Peter said

Several people have asked me to put bees in their yards. I don't do this
because I don't want to spoil their yards. They wouldn't be able to do a
lot of the things they like to do, sit
and picnic or whatever, with a big cloud of bees scurrying in and out of the
hives.

Let's be careful about sweeping generalizations.  I agree, you would not
want to put an apiary in an urban yard.  But I've seen many urban hives in
hundreds of gardens, on patios, even on balconies of high rise apartments
in Seattle, Maryland, Portland, San Antonio, New Mexico. We spent several
years sampling bees in urban settings for pollution studies. I've seen
hives on rooftops, where the biggest threat is to the beekeeper (falling
off the roof of a 3 story Victorian house -- a painter built a platform on
a steep roof, hung a ladder from a window, and climbed down to work the
hives and up with the supers when harvesting honey -- only hives I didn't
sample, too scared to attempt the climb on the ladder hanging on ropes).
With proper placement, gentle management, and selection of gentle lines of
bees, 1-3 hives in a yard or garden pose no such problems as you list above.

On the other hand, 50-100 colonies in a yard a few blocks away can be a big
problem, if the beekeeper doesn't provide water at the yard, and if the
main honey flow resources are skimpy at those times of the year when
backyard gardens are in full bloom.

You can end up saturating yards with bees up to 1 mile away--I know, we've
counted bees in fields in wide open areas of MT, where the nearest bee
colonies were up to 1-2 miles away, yet you could see several bees per
every square yard of space.

Somewhere in my archives, I have photos of bees on tiny balcony patios,
just enough room for the hive between the wall and the railing, and 1 chair
sitting beside the hives.  The apartment residents liked to sit on the
chair and watch the bees -- as did their neighbors in adjacent apartments.

Cheers

Jerry