I wonder whether you should put up advisory signs “Note; this yard contains bees”?
Rooftop beekeeping is spreading in Toronto. I believe the Royal York Hotel, the fancy old railway hotel in the heart of downtown, has hives on its roof and actually has its own brand of honey that is served to guests.
That’s cool!
I’m inclined to mention the presence of the hive as little as possible. No one goes in our backyard anyways and it’s completely fenced off (tall wooden fence, not chainlinked). Anyone back there without my permission/invitation probably don’t belong there anyways, and will be at the mercy of my guard bees 
:D. As long as they don’t swarm I don’t think they will even be noticed much. If they do swarm somewhere I’ll have it handled, just as if it happened naturally.
I was going to mention the roof. I’ve never kept bees, but my dad kept a hive from when I was in high school. He located it on the garage roof both in order to raise the height of the flight path and to keep the hive from being bothered by people passing it.
One of our neighbors was allergic, but there was no problem. He made sure that there was nothing on his property that would attract bees, and he did it long before Dad got the hive.
I’ve been reading about bees, and found a cool website, BuzzAboutBees which has a lot of information you may find helpful.
Tips for beekeepers, as well as things anyone can do to help out the bee population.
(I’m going to buy white clover seed and scatter it in my yard.)
Remember to tell the bees anything important that happens in your family. Otherwise they will get upset and fly away or stop making honey. And invite them to any family weddings. Bees are very sensitive.
Kipling says so.
Sorry for delay answering:
About 20 hives (a smallish operation)
The bees are on a large rural property, so there is no need for fences or directional assistance. However, when we had hives in our back yard (still damn big - 3ish acres) we put up a fence behind to help shield them from view of the neighbors.
The bees actually don’t stay in the territory long, they’re either inside or they’re out anywhere in a 2ish mile radius around the hive collecting nectar or searching for new sources.
They DO like pools, and chlorine pools are very bad for them. To keep them out of the pool for their own safety, you need to make a bee waterer - basically a bucket with a pump and a flat floating board for the bees to land on while they drink.
Classes are a good idea, but really the best option is to find a beekeeping guild or organization in your area, and see if any of them are open to either official apprentices, or unofficial helpers. Stay with them for a full year, helping with a whole cycle of bee-keeping. Then you can learn about hives and bee identification, and frames and supers, and bee diseases and feeding, and propolis and pollen cakes, and smoking mediums and all the rest of it…
BEFORE you spend a shit-ton of money on your own hives and equipment, and realize afterwards that you really can’t stand bees buzzing by your ears or that you just aren’t up to squishing moth larvae to death with your fingers, or hunting down the queen in the middle of a blazing August to squish HER because the hive just fricking won’t stop swarming itself to death, or going out in the cold every damn day with warm sugar water to keep them alive and healthy through the winter months.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s rewarding. But it is VERY hard work, and not nearly as romantic as it looks from outside.
Since you’ve spoken w/ local experts, I presumed you checked to ensure it is legal in your burb? Even if legal, there may be regs on where to site it, number of hives, etc. It is illegal in my Chicago burb. 
I love bees. We had a few dozen hives when I was a kid, and I would love to start that again. Also, the honey, and the honeycomb is so delicious. Honey is one of my very favorite foods to this day.
I’ve checked, my city doesn’t have any ordnance forbidding it, and I’ve found a couple of neighbors via NextDoor (like a neighborhood facebook) who do keep bees. So it’s a thing here. The county does regulate it, I have to register my hive for yearly inspections ($5) and apply for a license (free).
Lasciel, thanks for your input. I’m definitely getting involved with my local beekeeping association and have found some folks in my area who keep bees and are willing to mentor. So I’m off to a good start! I’m used to picking up hobbies that require a significant time/skill/money commitment, so that doesn’t bother me. My main concern right now that I haven’t seen addressed well in my reading is how to keep the whole operation down to one hive. A thriving colony is eventually going to outgrow the hive and swarm to find bigger digs, how do you prevent swarming while managing hive size? I don’t have room for stacks of supers and multiple hives. So far the only thing I can think of is splitting the colony and having someone take the other half off my hands…
Sadly, I think there is your answer. 
Hmmm I don’t see how that curbs colony growth? They will either make a new queen in short order or I’ll have to provide one. I could be wrong though.
You should provide a queen, yes.
The queen is responsible for the growth pattern of the hive, so you have to select and purchase a pre-flown queen (translation: fertilized queen) who has the traits you’re looking for.
There are disease-resistant queens (for specific diseases even!) and queens who are from “lines” that are very active and go-getters, there are lines that are more “docile” (translation: a bit on the lazy side), queens that produce more drones (sometimes good for disease control, or for when you’re a hive-breeder and want to create new hives for people), or queens who produce more workers, queens who are bred to live longer, stronger lives (usually beekeepers in the southeastern USA replace the queen every 1-3 years whether the old queen is aging or not)…
So when your hive absolutely has to be a certain way (although that is just a bad plan from the get-go - see my note below), you go purchase your new queen, and when you get her, you hunt down and squish the old one, and then put the new one in, and they eventually get acclimated, (and you go in and squish all the opportunistic queen eggs that the workers laid in the hopes that those would hatch and kill the intruder queen you stuck in there), and she starts laying eggs that will hatch out into a new genetic line of bees that will hopefully do what you want!
But, that might still not work.
There are also things like location - sometimes a hive just doesn’t work in a certain spot.
Or season - sometimes it’s just something in the air (or pollen) or whatever, and you’ll be dealing with swarms out the wazoo where you never had troubles with that hive before.
RE: Control. It’s a wild nature thing - you are going to have to accept from the beginning that there’s a limit to how much you can shape the behavior of the colony, or you’re going to wear yourself out trying to change things instead of just adapting to the bees and working with them and what they want to do.
I swear I have fun with the bees - I feel like Debbie Downer over here! 
While multiple hives aren’t required, the stacks of supers pretty much are a necessity.
One of the ways you can help keep a hive from wanting to swarm off is to continually provide them with more room to live and store. As the population grows, you HAVE to provide extra supers for them to expand into, or they get really unhappy. It’s a yearly cycle - more in the spring and summer, less in the fall and winter.
With only one hive, you’ll also probably switch supers out when you harvest, so you’ll need a storage space for the ones you switched, after they’ve been emptied and cleaned for next use. There’s also equipment like the suits and the smokers and the extra frames and trays and wax sheets and queen excluders and all that. You pretty much need a good little potting shed or corner of a garage to keep all the stuff in.
As far as population, you kind of WANT the hive to grow and be strong. You just have to give them enough room to do that happily. Now, if you’re really desperate, you can do things like take frames of worker brood out and destroy them - that’ll keep the population down also. But that’s going to impact your honey harvest, and also is a hit to the general health of the hive, and there are some keepers who think that leads the queen to go a little bit nutso because she KNOWS how many she laid, and knows that they didn’t hatch, and doesn’t know where they went. (None of that bit is proven.)
Sorry for the double post!
Thanks for the replies Lasciel, you have been very informative! You should link a pic of your setup.
I’m pretty sure workers can only lay haploid eggs, which hatch drones. They might be able to move existing diploid eggs into queen cells and feed the larvae royal jelly.
Who da thunk it?
IIRC, any egg can become a Queen. It’s determined solely by how long and how much royal jelly a larvae is fed.
It has to be diploid though, otherwise you get a drone no matter what. Workers can only lay unfertilized haploid eggs. Queens can lay either.
Ah, got it!