Apiaries are a resource Building that generates Honey and Wax, useful in the creation of Candles and Beer respectively. Resources produced by Apiaries are collected by Farmers as a lower priority task when they are not engaged in other Crop Field activities.
While Apiaries have little impact on the settlement generally, there is a small risk of Maladies in the form of Bee Stings from those apiaries located close to residences and to the Farmers handling collection of Apiary products.
Basic Strategy
Apiaries have a baseline production that can receive a bonus based on adjacent wild plantlife, crop fields, settlement decorations, and certain levels of Shelter upgrades.
Apiaries can be overlapped, but production will be reduced based on how much of the work areas are overlapped. (e.g. 2 fully-overlapped apiaries will have nearly half of normal production, 3 fully-overlapped apiaries will have nearly a third of normal production, and so on.)
This diminishment will not show up in the building preview mode when overlapping with Apiary construction sites, only completed apiaries. However, once all apiaries construction sites are built, production rates will plummet as outlined above.
Work areas for Apiaries cannot be moved, bees do not care for the command of settlement leaders.