> how do I determine the carrying capacity for
> that particular location?  What are the barometers?  

I had this same question when placing hives on Sourwood in the mountains of
VA.  What was the optimal number of hives per stand of Sourwood?  It is an
early opportunistic colonizer of clear cuts and burned-over areas, and
therefore is a very finite supply in specific areas, surrounded by forests
of trees that bloomed months ago.

What I did (and still do in the City, where some rooftops that may seem good
are rendered utterly useless by wind turbulence or unexpectedly high average
wind velocity between tall buildings, as Daniel Bernoulli must have hated
urban beekeeping) was to weigh each hive periodically and attempt to find
trends in net weight gain.   While the urban beekeeping case is much more
stark, there is a point of diminishing returns with any limited-forage area,
so adding the "Nth" hive should result in no overall net increase in the sum
of the short-term net weight gain of all the hives in the yard.   So, that
15th hive didn't help.

[Blatant Plug Warning!] This is exactly why I developed Fischer's Nectar
Detector(R) (patent pending), so that one could weigh each and every hive,
and see these sorts of things more easily, or at least be able to realize
that feeding will be required to recover from the error made when too many
hives are co-located.  

That said, tweaking a yard for the optimum number of hives to exploit a
specific bloom requires that the beekeeper be certain of the bloom start and
end to be able to test in the manner described above.  Blooms are no longer
as predictable as they once were, and even growing degree days are not as
useful a tool as they were 15 years ago.  Blame global wackiness due to
warming.

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html