Keeping horses near bee hives?

[Aarrghimpossiblepony]

we have kept bees in our horses field and never had any problems. if they are aggressive you can replace the queen hopefully with a better tempered one and the hive will be much better tempered. there are tempramant problems with some of the strains of bees imported from abroad - I think some of the south african ones are a problem

Exactly the same scenario with my ponies.
Had bee hives for years in their field, just fenced off with wire so the ponies couldn't get to the hives and no problems.

One queen one year turned nasty, that "infected" the whole hive and the only solution was to destroy that hive completely and replace. The other two hives were fine as before.

But when the problems started it wasn't the horses they went after, and it was quickly realised by the keeper there was a problem before they swarmed or attacked en masse.

You get quite a bit of warning, the bees start following you around or settling on posts/fences instead of getting on and doing their job collecting nectar. It's strange, I don't know anything about bees but it was quite clear that hive was disturbed by the behaviour of the bees that year.

 

[mandwhy]

How interesting, I didn't know that a nasty queen would affect the rest of the hive, bees are awesome! I would really like to keep them one day, we owe a lot to those little fellas!