Hi from Whitley Bay

[madasafish]

Welcome WillieBee

A very sensible approach as most beekeepers who succeed end up with N times the number of colonies they first thought of.

Where N ranges from 1 to several hundred...

(Yes,,, I am a boring former physicist..:-)

[beejazz]

Willie, all sounds perfectly sensible reasoning to me.

As Janeoh points out the Co-op do have a scheme, "Hive Talking", in place on their website trying to match beekeepers with potential apiary sites which may be worth a look.

If your own site has a more local focus then I reckon there's room enough for it too, we ran something similar in Bristol for a little while but started to have concerns that there were a lot of people perhaps taken with the notion of having bees in the garden without too much consideration as to whether it was actually suitable for them to have bees there; or a stranger tramping through their garden once a week for that matter being matched up with Novice beekeepers who perhaps weren't necessarily experienced or objective enough to judge whether that site they were desperately after was actually suitable for them either.

Totally agree, I was looking for another site and got in touch with some people who advertised space, one nice lady hadn't spoken to her husband about siting bees in their garden!, and another chap had a toddler/barbeques in his patio garden, he had more enthusiasm than any idea whether bees would be suitable in his out-door-living space. There is a desire to 'save-the-bees' amongst the non-beekeeping population..packet of wild flower seeds may satisfy?