Presently, I share 3 hives with a relative; this is great in as much as he has a decent sized house lot of about 3 acres, out in the bush, s no near neighbours to get antsy about them.
Downside is that he lives 12km away so it's a bit of a hike every time I want to check em out.
I'd like to have a couple more hives closer to home, preferably of my own but my own place is just a normal house lot in the suburbs, 850m2 or about 9000 sq feet, with neighbours on four sides. Fortunately we have reasonably mature trees all around and I'm confident that I could set up a small (2 hive) apiary with minimal impact on neighbours, however, the way the lot is developed, there's no free space on the ground where I could fit them in and stay married at the same time. I'm near the edge of suburbia, with lots of gardens with flowers etc to the West, South and East and bushland and farmland with great potential only 250 yards to the North.
I do have a 6m x 6m (20ft x 20ft) double car steel garage and I was toying with the idea of building a small timber platform over the roof (it's shallow pitched - only 20%) but against this is the faff involved in getting up and down, the risk of falling off but also the brazenness of it all - my place is on a small rise and I'm pretty sure that the sight of two hives sitting on my shed roof, sticking out like dogs balls for everyone to see would be a source of instant complaint to the Council and whilst I'm happy that I could fight that fight ok, by operating in compliance with the local State Govt approved Code of Practice for Urban Beekeeping (
http://dpipwe.tas.gov.au/Documents/Code%20of%20Practice%20for%20Urban%20Beekeping.pdf), I simply cannot be arsed with getting into a brawl with the neighbours over it.
I would let the home owners in the immediate vicinity know that I'm keeping bees but I think not being so "in yer face" would be better for long-term relations.
So I was thinking about a bit of crafty concealment in my shed. What got me thinking about this was some dealings, (in my former local council job) I had with an old guy who complained that he reckoned one of his neighbours was keeping bees as he'd had a swarm in his backyard, every summer for several years. What he'd not noticed, for several years was that he had a wild colony living in a hollow tree in the centre of his backyard; at the time I was amazed that he could be oblivious to this, not just him but his neighbours too.
So back to my place - my thinking is that I could set up a pair of standard-issue type hives in the shed but rig up some sort of pipe or ducting structure connected via a flexible corrugated pipe with a funnel-type arrangement that fits snugly over the hive entrances.
The ducting would lead up to an opening in the apex of the shed gable wall, probably via a couple of U-bends with drilled drainholes in the bottom of them, to stop any water build up. My thinking is to use PVC plumbing fittings which are cheap and robust; I'd have two entrances - probably paint them different colours so that the bees find their way into the correct pipe without getting lost.
Advantage would be that it's unlikely the neighbours would ever even realise I had them there as the entrance would be away from prying eyes and 9 feet off the ground, so the girls would be up up and away - the boundaries have several hedges around too, which obstruct direct sight-lines from the nearest neighbour's first floor balcony/deck which is 25 yards away, so I'm pretty confident that they wouldn't even know most of the time.
Inside the garage would be a fairly benign environment too, not too cold in winter and not too warm in summer.
It would be a fairly simple matter when working on the hives to close off the ducting by inserting a small sheet of metal or whatever, into a slot in the pipe, blocking off the hive entrance and then wheeling the whole thing out of the roller doors where I'd open it up. I work from home, so I could do this during the mornings on weekdays, when the neighbours are all at work/school, so further minimising potential angst.
I'd use a slotted bottom board and screened lid vents to ensure independent ventilation through the hive.
I've seen similar ducted external access arrangements used for observation hives in museums etc, not to mention wild hives living in the wall and roof cavities of houses, so I reckon the girls would be OK with a bit of a walk from hive to external entrance.
Is there any reason why this wouldn't work?
This is my site (shed circled) and shed/garage as seen from the outside - (wide angle lense, slightly distorted).