Keeping bees can be an extremely rewarding hobby. However, finding space for a hive in a small urban garden can be challenging One solution is to house your bees in a shed at the bottom of the garden. With some simple modifications, a shed can provide an ideal home for a small colony of honeybees In this article, we’ll look at everything you need to consider when keeping a hive in a shed, from modifying the structure to managing the bees.
Is it Possible to Keep Bees in a Shed?
Many novice beekeepers worry that keeping hives in sheds or outbuildings could harm the bees. However beekeepers have successfully overwintered hives in sheds garages and cellars for centuries. The key is providing the right conditions. Bees do well in a temperature range of around 10-15°C (50-59°F) with adequate ventilation to prevent condensation. A shed can actually help buffer colonies from extremes of hot and cold weather. With a little preparation, a shed can make an ideal apiary structure.
Modifying the Shed for Bees
You’ll need to make some modifications to the shed to create the right environment
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Add insulation – Insulate walls and ceiling to help maintain a stable temperature.
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Allow ventilation – Install mesh vents to allow airflow and prevent damp. Bees dislike humidity.
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Provide light – Bees need light to navigate, so add a glass panel or clear corrugated plastic sheet in the roof.
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Create entrances – Cut entrance holes in the wall leading directly outside so bees don’t get confused navigating inside the shed. Use short lengths of pipe so bees can find their way in and out.
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Select a suitable floor – Concrete is ideal as it’s easier to clean. Avoid earth floors which can get muddy.
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Add anchor points – Install screws or eye bolts so hives can be securely attached to shed walls.
Choosing a Hive
For a shed apiary, a smaller hive is easier to handle. Good options include:
- 5 frame nucleus hives
- Langstroth or National hives with just 1 brood box
- Top bar hives
Avoid huge hives with lots of stacked supers, as these will be extremely heavy and awkward to maneuver in and out of the shed.
Colony Management
Being housed in a shed does require some specific colony management techniques:
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Provide extra insulation around the hive over winter.
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Heft hives regularly to check food stores as you won’t see activity outside. Add emergency feed if needed.
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Plan inspections on sunny days when bees are flying. This avoids bees clustering inside the shed after closing up.
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Only inspect one hive at a time, sealing entrances to other colonies in the shed.
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Have a bee brush handy to gently guide stray bees to the hive entrance after inspections.
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Ventilate the shed well before inspections by opening doors/windows and allow time afterwards for bees to settle.
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Work calmly and gently to avoid agitating bees in the confined space.
Pros and Cons of a Shed Apiary
Keeping bees in a shed has both advantages and disadvantages:
Pros
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Protection from adverse weather.
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Reduced risk of hive theft or vandalism.
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Unobtrusive location for hives in built up areas.
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Can facilitate beekeeping on small plots.
Cons
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Accessing hives may be less convenient than an outdoor apiary.
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Limited space for expansion. A shed can only hold a few hives.
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Bees can become agitated when working hives inside the shed.
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Harder to see hive activity levels.
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Requires more hands-on management and intervention e.g checking food stores.
While keeping bees in a shed takes a bit more work, it can be an excellent solution for urban beekeepers or those with limited space. With good setup and management, bees can thrive in a shed apiary. The most important thing is providing colonies with stable conditions, ventilation and easy access to the outside. Following the tips above will give your bees the best chance of success in their garden hive.
Benefits for the bees
I suspect that the main beneficiaries of the bee shed are the beekeepers, not the bees. However, colonies do appear to do well in the shed.
It seems like brood rearing starts earlier in the season and ends later, but we haven’t been able to prove this officially yet. We now have some hives inside and outside the shed fitted with Arnia monitors. With these we can monitor brood temperature, humidity, hive weight and activity.
Brood temperature is an indicator of brood rearing, with temperatures around 33°C showing that the queen is laying. We hope to be able to tell when brood rearing stops and starts again by keeping an eye on colonies over the winter. This will also help us figure out if the bees’ season is actually “longer” inside the shed.
But it’ll be months until we’ll see this sort of entrance activity again …
{{1}}: And if yours don’t, they should!
Which could mean that, as the season comes to a close, the number of sealed and unsealed eggs is dropping as expected.
{{3}}: Where we can control the environment much more accurately.
The word “4” is fairly new—it was first used less than 30 years ago—and it means “very windy.” It comes from the Orkney word “hoolan,” which comes from Old Icelandic and Faroese words that mean “howling” or “wailing.”
{{5}}: And less rain and wind.
You can get LEDs that are much brighter, but they don’t fit into standard ES or bayonet ceiling mounts very well.
[7]: Maybe a little too much, since some of the beekeepers working with the hives aren’t very experienced.
{{8}}: This is a confusing definition—kippered means to clean, salt, and smoke herring, while an Arbroath smokie is smoked haddock—but you get the idea.
{{9}}: However, if space elsewhere in the shed is available these work very well.
{{10}}: And therefore the optimal time to treat with dribbled Api-Bioxal for the winter Varroa management.
Why keep bees in a shed at all?
A bee hive provides a secure and weatherproof container to protect the colony {{1}}. Why then keep bee hives inside a building, like the bee shed?.
Beekeeping, of necessity, involves regular inspections at 7-10 day intervals throughout the main part of the season. During these checks, the hive is opened and looked inside for signs of disease, proof that the colony is growing as planned, enough food and space, and signs that the colony is planning to swarm.
Since these inspections involve opening the hive the weather needs to be at least half-decent. It’s not a fun time for either the bees or the beekeeper because of the heavy rain, low temperatures, and cold winds.
That’s not a problem if you can choose days when the weather is nice to check on the colony.
But we don’t have that luxury.
Deformed wing virus and chronic bee paralysis virus are the main viruses that threaten the health of the colonies. The hives in the shed are used to study these viruses. Even though we don’t do experiments in these hives, we do get larvae, pupae, and workers from them all the time for lab work {{3}}
We therefore must be able to open and work in the hives:
- very early in the season
- It’s very late in the season; as I write this in early November, we’re still collecting brood.
- no matter what the weather is like at certain times and/or days of the week
This is the east coast of Scotland. Whether it’s pouring rain, a hoolie {{4}}, really cold, or a mix of these things (which happens a lot), it’s not only bad for the beekeeper but also bad for the bees.
… and they let us know about it.
To keep the bees and the beekeeper safe, we built a shed that can fit standard National hives and has simple tunnels that connect it to the outside.
From the outside it looks like a shed.
From the inside it looks like an apiary with wooden walls and less light {{5}}.
Details of the first shed and its successor are posted elsewhere. There are up to seven full colonies living in the current shed, which is 16 feet by 8 feet and has a wall facing south.
This wall of the shed has windows all the way along it, and there is enough storage space for dozens of extra supers, brood boxes, floors, the hivebarrow, and a couple of hundred kilograms of fondant.
Hives are all arranged ‘warm way’ on a single full-length stand and inspected from the rear.
How does all this work in practice?
The shed is probably still too small
There is a pretty narrow path between the hives and the stacks of supers and fondant once all that lovely storage space is used up. For a lone beekeeper this isn’t an issue. For training purposes, or with multiple people working at once, it’s distinctly cramped.
There is a lot of walking back and forth to the door during inspections (see below). This would be much easier if:
- Not putting away extra hives, fondant, broods, and the wheelbarrow in the shed
- letting only very skinny people who don’t know what “personal space” means use the shed
- having a much wider shed
Of these, the last option is probably the most realistic.
I’ve recently been asked for comments about using a shed for a school beekeeping association. Several trainees are huddling around the hive, so this is probably going to involve some training. Here’s what I would do:
- Limit the number of hives to three in a 16-foot-long shed. Each hive should be on its own stand, and there should be room to get to it from both the back and the sides.
- You should either get a bigger shed or find another place to store all of those “essential” spares.
The shed has a solar powered LED lighting system running off a 100Ah ‘leisure’ battery. Six of the brightest LED lights on the market (each with 750 lumens and 120W of power) are placed right above the hives.
The lighting is great. Being able to work in the shed “off grid” in the evenings or on cloudy days is very helpful.
On a sunny day, though, this lighting isn’t very important compared to the light coming in through the windows.
No matter what the weather is like, though, the lighting inside the shed isn’t great for finding eggs or day-old larvae.
It could be because my eyesight is getting worse, but I keep popping out of the shed door to check the frames for eggs or tiny larvae. It’s a lot easier when the sun is behind you and the frame is tilted to light up the bottom of the cells.
I’m going to move the lights so they run down the middle of the shed instead of directly above the hives. That way it will be ‘over the shoulder’ when inspecting frames.
If that doesn’t work, the only thing left to do is buy banks of LEDs… or glasses
Also, the solar panel, charge controller, large lead acid battery, and “on when open” door switch have all worked perfectly. There was no pun intended.
The shed windows are formed from overlapping sheets of perspex.
The weather cannot get in, but bees can easily get out. They climb up the big pane and under the pane that overlaps it. Then they fly out of the 2cm gap between that pane and the top of the window open. It’s a simple and highly-effective solution to emptying a shed of bees after inspections.
But I’ve discovered this year that wasps can learn to enter the shed via the windows.
2018 was a bad year for wasps. I lost a nuc and a queenless (actually a requeening) colony to robbing by wasps in this apiary. Around the middle of the season, wasps learned how to get into the shed through the “slot” in the window. For a few weeks, they were a real pain. I believe we were partly to blame because we had some comb scraps in a trash can that wasn’t closed properly. Once the wasps had discovered this source of honey/nectar they were very persistent … as wasps are.
This hasn’t been a problem in the past, so I’m hoping that better apiary hygiene will keep it from happening next year.
Our bees are calm and well behaved. However, we still use a limited amount of smoke during inspections {{7}}. If you leave a well-lit smoker next to the hive while you inspect it, you will definitely get as smoked out as an Arbroath smokie {{8}}. It doesn’t take long to fill the shed with smoke.
I therefore leave the smoker standing ‘ready for action’ just outside the shed door. It’s simple (as long as the shed isn’t full of people) to go to the door, get the smoker, give them a light puff, put it back, and keep going.
Sheds are made of wood. Beehives are wood or polystyrene. The stacks of spare supers and broods are full of wax-laden frames.
All this has the potential to burn very well indeed.
I’m therefore very careful to leave the smoker, securely plugged with grass, on a non-flammable surface. The wire of a spare open mesh floor is ideal for this.
Checking the hives, putting up supers, preventing and controlling swarms, and treating for Varroa work just as well inside the bee shed as they do outside.
There are a few limitations of course.
It’s not possible (or at least not practical) to provide an upper entrance that leads to the outside world, so vertical splits for making increase or swarm control aren’t an option.
Also, there isn’t a lot of room next to a hive, so a classic Pagden artificial swarm might not be possible {{9}} I usually use the nucleus method to control swarms instead. To make a nuc, I take out the old queen and a frame of brood and stores, then I leave the hive in the shed to requeen.
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