How many hives to make a living

Assembly can take some time as you need to build the actual hive boxes that require wood glue and nails and then assemble the frames. Make sure to account for the time it will take to gather materials, read the directions, and then actually assemble. Beehives are painted for a variety of reasons. A primer and a few coats of paint protect it from the elements. Different colors, preferably bright colors, can help bees and beekeepers alike distinguish between hives.

A painted beehive can make a visual statement. See my guide here on painting your beehive — how to paint your beehive? Another thing that will take time is deciding where to purchase your bees. Many hardware stores offer bee ordering in the winter for pickup in the early spring.

Installing bees can take a little while, especially if you are new and inexperienced. A lot of the time it takes to install deals with reading enough material and watching enough videos to get comfortable with the process and what to expect. The amount of time you will need to spend inspecting a hive will vary by person and by the hive. Inspections can take anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes depending on experience and hive temperament.

An inspection consists of checking for brood, mites, honey, and behavior. When you get more experience as a beekeeper, you will be able to spot brood, mites, and honey quickly. You will generally be more in tune with hive behavior to determine if everything is going smoothly or if something is amiss. When calculating how much time you will have to invest in beekeeping, this is an important factor. You will have to make time to collect honey from each hive, package it, and find a place to store it.

It will dictate how many hives you can start out with. Here are the two main components which are a must for beekeeping:. Ideally, this will be a one time cost, but with the dangers of varroa mites and Colony Collapse Disorder, your hive may not make it, and you will have to buy a replacement package.

After the initial startup costs, beekeeping is relatively cheap as the input is mainly at the beginning unless you need to purchase more bees. So, if you are a beginner beekeeper, you are not only supposed to be learning by taking care of your bees. It is equally as important for you to learn by actually reading books, attending different beekeeping seminars and talks, and taking cues from an experienced mentor in the field as well. As such, by maintaining only 2 beehives during your first year as a beekeeper, you will have enough time to learn more about beekeeping so that you will be able to increase that number by the time you are ready to do so during your second year as a beekeeper.

Still, if you do insist on starting out with only one hive because of time and financial constraints, you can do so. But, then again, having multiple beehives will also allow you to compare how well the beehives are doing so that you, as a beginner, can learn more about the bees while you are still in your first year.

You can compare the production and the health of the bees in one hive compared to the other. Of course, you can also start out with 3 or 4 beehives but, again, make sure that you know how to manage your time and resources well enough to keep all of those colonies healthy and thriving throughout your first year. Of course, you are not starting out as a beekeeper for no reason at all. One of the reasons why you may be thinking of becoming a beekeeper is to make money out of it.

So, how many beehives should you have to actually make a living? If you are looking to actually make a full-time living out of being a beekeeper, you would have to quit your day job and then devote yourself to taking care of your beehives on a daily basis. So, if you were to do that, you would need more than a hundred beehives to make a living.

However, for those who are only beekeepers on the side because they still maintain their full-time 9 to 5 jobs, they can make good money from 25 to beehives. Any number between 25 and should be good enough for an experienced beekeeper on the side, since the honey and the bee products sold from those hives would be good enough to augment a full-time salary. So, since you are merely a beginner right now, try working your way up from 2 beehives to about 25 or more so that you can earn more money from this side endeavor.

However, if you are financially capable of sustaining hundreds of bee colonies later on after you have gained enough experience in the field of beekeeping, you may be able to take a leap of faith and quit your full-time job to become a full-time beekeeper aiming to reach more than or even hives.

As a beginner beekeeper, your target is to learn more about beekeeping until you are capable of sustaining a larger apiary, which is the official name for a bee yard or the place or location where you keep your beehives. So, you have to start from a couple of beehives in your first year until you are ready to take on a larger number in terms of your financial capabilities and your experience. From there, a lot of different beekeepers start by keeping their beehives in their backyard until they are ready to go for a larger property where they can keep their beehives.

This is when the simple endeavor now becomes a true apiary. But how many hives should you be keeping in a single apiary? Most of us live in areas where there is plenty of nectar sources. Bees are sharp when it comes to finding nectar.

You know where some good restaurants are and if you don't you know how to go out looking for that perfect steak house. Bees are even better than we are at finding food. It is extremely important to remember that bees fly miles out to gather nectar. I think some people think of bees as dogs, meaning that they think the bees will stay in their yard. Unless you have a huge yard, it is not' going to happen.

Now, let's say you live in town and you own a regular lot where beekeeping is permissible. Your bees will fly 2 to 3 miles around searching for nectar. One of my bee yards is located just on the edge of a city of 10, people. The bees fly straight up and out and late this summer they brought in a lot of alfalfa honey. They weren't getting this in town! Within a 2 mile radius there are over 8, acres. A 3 mile radius includes over 12, acres of nectar to choose from!

It just makes better practice to start with two or more hives. I started with one hive and through neglect it died off and since I had only one hive, I was out of beekeeping for several years.

Now don't let me discourage you if you can only start with one hive. You can start with one and do great! You can add more and more hives as the years go by. And, your one hive may never die. Instead, you might get many splits from your first hive. You just never know. But, your chances of success are increased by the more hives you have. All prices are in USD. Please wait Sign in or Create an account. My assumption — justified below — is that the majority of beekeepers produce few, if any, surplus nucs.

Firstly, nuc and package imports from overseas are very high. Demand is enormous and is clearly not met by local supply There are some major gaps in the available information meaning that the next bit is a guesstimate with a capital G.

Here are the final figures. Remember, this is for a four hive apiary, per annum 4 year average. Experienced beekeepers reading this far 15 will appreciate some of the assumptions that have been made. There are many. Mid-May … 45, bees, 17 frames of brood, one queen … now marked and clipped. But remember, our hypothetical beekeeper is based upon the average productivity and number of hives reported in the BBKA annual surveys. This article highlights some of the major expenses involved in beekeeping.

However, the purpose of this post was to provide a framework to consider where potential cost savings can be made. Too tired to bottle up honey and sell it. Ah well — the house in France and the personalised number plate will have to wait!

Pregnant and a toddler makes everything tough, not just beekeeping. Another problem I found with the nucs was knowing when to advertise them for sale. I felt like I should make sure the queen was established and laying well, but then if you keep a thriving colony in a nuc for too long they get squashed and you run the risk of them trying to swarm again. If you get a chance to cover anything on the timings of that in your money savings posts that would be great! Hi Emily Without doubt overwintered nucs are much more valuable.

As with all things beekeeping, timing will differ depending upon climate and latitude. I always try and overwinter a few nucs. They are always useful. Fantastic article as always.

I should have bought 6 5kg bags from Costco rather than the three I brought home I have three hives plus nucs so am very nearly average. Hi Alastair Take note of footnote 10 … the absolute amount may be different depending upon where you are and the strain of bees. Cheers David. Just keeping healthy bees with the added work of beetles wax moths and mites is enough to send you off the top. A real pleasure to read you works here. Enjoy your bees Cheers David.

My mentor told me that if you want to make a small fortune from beekeeping start with a large one!! As usual, a sensible and helpful posting, much appreciated. However, re: note 17, is it not also wishful thinking that sugar syrup supplies the same nutrients to the bees that honey provides? If you were a bee, would you really make no distinction between converted sugar syrup and honey as a winter feed? This stored syrup has, after all, been processed by the bees in the same way as nectar from the flowers.

I would think that the contents are distinguishable, though perhaps not as easily as you might think. Consider the problem with the thousands of tonnes of adulterated honey sold and imported every year. At least some of this will presumably have been fed as syrup colonies, extracted and then exported. Certainly there are likely to be differences in pollen content.