In anticipation of my bees arriving soon, I started construction on my apiary today. That's just a fancy word for bee yard.The big concern is that my neighbor said he saw a bear out in the back of our property last year, so I figured that it would be best to fence it in.
After a long consultation with The Cowgirl, we settled on this location. It's about 40 feet off the road behind some trees. The Bee Keeping for Dummies book said to have good southern exposure, and not too much shade - I think this is going to be perfect. The book talks about a flat, level surface for the hive to stand on, so I thought I'd put down some cement paving stones on a bed of sand, then build a fence with barbed wire for the bears.
Here's the 700 pounds of materials for the project. The ol' Santa Fe was just about maxed out. Cue the song "Lowrider".
I put down two layers of that black landscape plastic under the pressure treated 4x4 as a border. Then I filled it sand. Frank the dog came back to supervise.
Not really rocket science, but I think it will work just fine for the bees.
Next weekend, I'm going to put in 8 foot 4x4 posts and attach the horse fence material and run some barbed wire around it to keep the bears and raccoons out.The bees should be here the first part of May.
See you next time.
