Designing Our Apiary

The layout and design of our apiary involved a lot of research and planning. My goals were to have a readily available and diverse diet for our honeybees, include all native plants to where we live (Park City, Utah) and have safe plants around our family. Our apiary site is on our property in the mountains at 8000’ of elevation, so finding hearty plants to grow was a bit challenging. We also had to consider the wildlife who live off our land and be sure the plants were safe for foraging.

As you may know, we started our beekeeping journey with two hives (one package & one nuc). We anticipate growing over the years so we planned a bee yard that would handle around 12 hives, which is my max! We wanted the bee yard to be within walking distance from our home but not so far down on our property that we were walking ten minutes to get to the bees in the summer sun. As we are building our home and changed the plans a few times, so changed our bee yard location and size. In the end, it was decided to be about 80 yards from a fresh spring and just the right distance from our home. It is 250 square feet and fenced in with a five-foot electric fence to prevent wildlife mishaps. The two hives look quite small at the moment, but we have plenty of room to expand the apiary over the years and not have to rework the entire space. We had a custom shed built to house the numerous  beekeeping supplies so we can easily load up the wagon with supplies and complete inspections with ease and efficiency.

Figure 1 Our completed bee yard. A wildlife camera was added to keep an eye on things.

We then got to work with a landscape designer for the garden aspect of the apiary. They were fabulous in working with our engineers to find the perfect location for the garden. We had a second designer plan the irrigation for the garden to be sure all plants would have what they needed to thrive. In the future, we plan on connecting a well to the irrigation system for essentially free water (dare I say free!). In single dimension it seemed straight forward, however, it took several weeks to plan around the mountainous terrain that is our property.

Figure 2 Layout of our home and honeybee garden

I feel we have the perfect property for keeping honeybees. We have ten acres with no neighbors and we are south facing with only a few large trees that block the sun. Our honeybees are in the full sun from sunrise to sunset in every season. That also meant that the garden would be in full sun and we’d need to carefully pick plants that can handle that type of exposure. I chose plants frequented by honeybees, not just pollinators in general. Not all flowering plants attract honeybees and not all flowering plants are good sources of nectar and pollen for honeybees. Research has shown over the years that honeybees favor flowering plants that are blue, purple, yellow and white in color. Honeybees are able to see ultraviolet light so what they see in a flower is completely different than what humans see.

Here is a link to a quick read article from NC State further discussing the topic of bee vision. What I love about the article is the link at the very end that lists every flower (arranged by plant family) with a description of how they appear under normal light conditions and UV light. https://news.ncsu.edu/2024/07/wms-what-bees-see/

Listed below are the flowering plants we chose for our honeybee garden. We are aware of the few that are poisonous to dogs but they will be planted in known spaces and we anticipate being hypervigilant. Daffodils have special meaning to us as a family and were a must-be in the garden and around our home and Cap Plumago and Allium are beautiful and a no-brainer to have around. We plan on having anywhere from two to twenty-seven blooming plants each month until we shut the honeybees up for winter. The diversity in their diet will keep them healthier over the seasons, will keep their immune systems strong and allow them to have rich nectar and pollen in their food stores for winter.

sainfoin	purple prairie clover	shasta daisy
smooth blue aster	douglas dustymaiden	slender vervain
aspen fleabane	hookers balsamroot	purple bee balm
rocky mountain penstemon	yellow beeflower	dusty penstemon
desert fernbush	sulfur slower buckwheat	wasatch penstemon
desert sage	Utah sweet vetch	thickleaf penstemon
blanket flower	wild hollyhock	firecracker penstemon
hoary tansyaster	threenerve goldenrod	daffodils *
mums	scarlet gilia	cape plumago*
purple coneflower	globemallow	allium*

* known to be poisonous to dogs

The designed garden area seems small in the figure below, but I wanted it more than three times this size! Shockingly, I changed my mind and decided that a smaller garden area would be ideal. We will have paths to walk around our garden for keeping up with weed control and overgrowth. If the wildlife start destroying the garden, we will likely have to install fencing around it but we will cross that bridge if and when we come to it. We will have other purposely planted trees and shrubs for the wildlife to forage on that hopefully will keep them away from the bee garden.

Figure 3 The simplified 250 sq’ garden area.

As of the fall of 2025, we still have not broken ground on our home and thus not the honeybee garden. We will be breaking ground in the spring of 2026 and shortly after we will start on the irrigation and garden for the honeybees. In the meantime, we will just have to remind ourselves to bee patient.