I am cutting back so I no longer want additional bee yards but I am leaving this page up for information purposes. Beekeepers are often looking for an additional yard to keep bees or they are limited in their location so that they cannot keep bees, thus needing a location to keep their bees. If you are looking to have someone keep bees on your property, contact your local beekeepers club.
Are you interested in having bees on your property but aren’t interested in taking care of them? I am a beekeeper with over 40 years of experience keeping bees. I regularly speak about beekeeping at schools, libraries, and nature centers. I try to locate my bees in places where they can do well and it is convenient for me in travel for service. I am currently looking for bee yards in the area between Byron Center, Caledonia, Middleville, and Dorr, Michigan. I try to space my yards out three to four miles apart to minimize competitive grazing on available forage. If you would like to investigate the possibility of me placing some bees on your property, I would like to be sure that we have a common understanding before we get too far and have conflict. There are a few things you need to understand about bees to avoid disagreement later. They are summarized in my Yard Letter. Should you want to pursue further, you should take a look at my Yard Agreement.
I am a 69 years old retired engineer and try not to produce too much honey, although 700 lbs in a year may be considered quite a bit to the average hobbyist. Instead, I am trying to use my experience to raise bees suited to the weather of Michigan and resistant to the pests currently plaguing beekeepers. I am also trying to demonstrate and prove an economic model of Northern Produced Nucs to replace or start colonies rather than the typical southern raised packages that I believe to be unsustainable with the invasion of Africanized Honey Bees in the south. Since Honey Bee Queens mate in the air and travel away from their home apiary to mate, I need to try to control the Drone population around my mating yards. Thus, I need bee yards surrounding my primary mating yards. I currently have yards as shown in the picture below:
I am thus looking for additional yards in the area without expanding my travel area. The image below shows both existing yards and the general locations that I desire. The circles of the image show the typical 2 mile pasture area covered by an apiary.
Sometimes I don’t find the closest possible yard but must be satisfied with a compromise, as can be seen in some of the overlaps and gaps. To help control the breeding population, I know that I have to work with other beekeepers in the area. Thus, I do not populate my yards to the maximum sustainable in the area but assume that over half of the pasture is taken up by other beekeepers and native pollinators. I will also cooperate with those local hobbyist beekeepers within my breeding area and provide a mated queen to them in exchange for a living queen from their hive free of charge, during the summer, at my convenience and mutual agreement of exchange date ahead of time. This is not an offer to migratory or commercial beekeepers transiting the area.
If you have questions, give me a call at 616.528.0737.