Hello all! I know there are a lot of questions regarding beehive placements, but I haven’t been able to find a good answer to this particular scenario so figured I would ask.
My house is built into a hillside such that the backside of my house is about ~25 feet lower than the front. The houses on our street have back decks built off the ground anywhere from 10-25 feet up from hill level such that the decks are aligned with the entry-level of the house (so our deck is ~25 feet off the ground).
I was hoping to place my hives underneath my deck as we are south facing and get a fair bit of sun at ground level. It has good accessibility and no foot traffic other than myself. My main concerns/questions are the following:
-Would I be giving myself any unnecessary risk placing hives underneath a deck like this (say, future deck maintenance, weather concerns)?
-My neighbor’s deck sticks out about 10 feet past ours, and the first occupied deck is about 12-15 feet off the ground above the top of where our hives would be (horizontal distance is also roughly 20 feet). Would there be a risk of any appreciable volume of bees flying up there and being a nuisance? Most things I read regarding hive placement assume most humans are at ground level and the bees would fly up, but our land actually goes down and the humans go up here- so I was concerned.
Image below shows proposed placement (filled red circle) and the first occupied deck (empty red circle at top). There are three more decks above this one with other tenants. The hill becomes fairly steep down from the proposed placement spot and continues out about 200 feet before the next houses at the base of the hill- lots of plants/weeds/trees a short distance away. At this time I don’t have any good spot to place the hives further down the hill as it’d require some more construction than I’m able to accommodate.
