Advantages of having my hives on my deck

There are many advantages of having my hives on my deck. Some of them are:

1. In my neighborhood, my house is at the highest point on my street. To see into my deck my neighbors have to look up. The bars on the rail keep them from seeing my hives.

2. I can watch the bees at all times of the day from the comfort of my sunporch. This allows me to learn more than if they were located on the fence line of my yard.

3. I can observe what comes out of the hive quite easily because the deck offers more for me to see than if the hives were in grass - so I can get a pretty good idea of how many dead bees are being brought out.....hey, we don't have snow much in Atlanta and this gives me the advantage those of you with hives in the snow have of being able to see what comes out of the hive in the winter

4. One could argue that the small hive beetle might be thwarted by not being able to breed in the dirt below the hive since there's only wood there, but I can attest to the thriving presence of the SHB, despite being 14 or 15 feet above the ground.

Here's what I see from my table on the sunporch.


















5. If I am feeding the bees, it's quite easy to refill the feeder at night (or at least it was easy on Mellona and Bermuda). When I got to Proteus, home of the aggressive bees, I lifted out the feed bottle to find a bee attached to it. I left the bottle on the deck and went inside to make more syrup. When I came out 30 minutes later the bee had returned to her hive, but when I placed the bottle in the Boardman (it's 11:30 PM) the bees inside the hive roared a loud buzz and several came out to see what I was doing.


















I visited P.N. Williams today (source of my two nucs) and I asked him about the different nature of the bees in Proteus compared to the bees in Mellona. Did he think they might be Russian? He laughed and said that these bees were "what we call mutt bees" because the queen is naturally mated and who knows who she was with in the process!

Below is a picture of Proteus before I removed the bottle and bee that came with it. Notice that the bottom board (formerly the roof) now has no bees on it.


















6. People can stand inside my sunporch and watch me work the bees without worry of being stung. My daughter Becky took this picture through the door last summer while I was inspecting the hives.