Our local beek association has geographic focus groups for those in similar
plant/weather areas. I'm in the process of putting together a map
of general locations & numbers of our groups colonies to get an idea of how
many colonies/square mile & acre we have based on OUR known apiary's. The
general purpose for the map is to help access OUR colony saturation/density
per acre. This hopefully will relate to the general health and success
(longevity and honey production) of our colonies and the integrated pest
management (IPM) efforts that we can expect to have to implement during the
year. The total acres can vary widely depending on how far we think our
bees fly to gather food. Based upon our mixed rural/urban area, we are
discussing using a flight distance of 2-3 miles for each apiary. This would
equal an approximate area of 12-28 sq. miles, or 7,680-17,920 acres for a
given apiary. We will have overlapping areas so we plan to take that fact
into account.

Doing a brief search to try and get a better feel for numbers (colony/X
acres) in a mixed urban-rural area, I found the following on the Internet:


   1. It is normal to have up to 100 feral colonies of bees per square mile
   of mixed forest and meadow. This translates to one feral colony/6 acres.
   Above this density and winter losses tend to cut the number of colonies
   significantly.
   2. Average colonies/acre recommended for agricultural crops grown in the
   USA range from 1-7/acre. Most crops that benefit from honey bees require
   2-3/acre.
   3. The London Beekeepers Association claims that there are already too
   many hives in the 600 square mile London region. With 3,337 registered
   hives, that figures to 5.5 colonies/square mile, or 1 colony/116 acres,
   which they say already severely limits honey production to only 37 lbs
   /colony, way below the national average.

For just as a quick exercise (I hope my numbers are correct!), I used 1
colony/100 acres, assuming a flight distance of 2-3 miles with no other
colonies within that distance and an excess honey/colony yield of
approximately 35 lbs (I know, it seams low). The area for the apiary would
be 12-28 sq. miles, or 7,680-17,920 acres, resulting in approximately
77-179 colonies for that single apiary, or 6.4-6.5 colonies/sq. mile. At
first glance, that doesn't seem like a lot of colonies in that 12-28 sq.
mi. area, but take that scenario and apply it to my apiary. I know of 13
colonies within a 2 mi. radius of my apiary. That's twice as many
colonies as calculated above given the assumptions! So that knocks down the
available forage area for each colony to 50 acres. This limited, brief
exercise shoes how the number of colonies in a given area could potentially
impact colony health, longevity and honey production. And the question of
IPM for mite control, weather, or just colony management problems hasn't
been discussed or taken into account yet. As a calibration, we'd have to
use actual performance before our group cries foul!

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