Full time beekeepers

[BeeManiac]

How many hives does one need to have if they dont plan on sending hives to Cali to beek fulltime? Assuming you are selling bees and honey and doing local pollinations. Making 50k a year?

[Vance G]

There are so many variables that anything ventured would be a W-A_G! Find the price of honey, find the price of bees, equipment, supplies, fuel, facilities, unknown losses due to weather, pesticide, animals, vandals and plain dumb luck and always, your personal ablities. Amount of rain, of snow, of days too windy, late frosts, early frosts, ad infinitum! After assigning numbers to it all you will have an estimate of your question. Could vary from 500 to 500,000 colonies.

[Keith Jarrett]

Vance, very well said.

[Grant]

Yeah, I was going to go full-time many, many years ago. Pollination is hard to get into as many farmers already had contracts and trusted RELATIONSHIPS with other beekeepers. No grower wants to switch until they know you can deliver the goods. Undercutting another pollinator is a short-term proposition with little benefit to anyone.

My very first honey crop was sold to the CCC for a crop loan. I needed the money to pay bills. If I had kept my day job, I would have the patience to MARKET my honey for a much better price. Once you DEVELOP a customer base, they'll come back. But this takes patience.

This is not a business you can jump into with instant results. It's like farming. If I had to do it all over again and wanted to go full-time, I'd have a day job to pay the bills and get established. Stay debt-free. I'd work with an established commercial beekeeper with plans to either buy-in or partnership. Or I'd go slow on my own and build the business, learn the trade, making my own splits rather than selling bees. I wished I learned how to raise my own queens so I could work toward self-reliance. Then you'll start growing and you'll be forced to make choices. I'm at a point where my retail honey marketing is cramping my time in the bee yard and my production is suffering. I'm moving toward more wholesale bottled honey.

There's a million ways to make money keeping bees. The number of hives is totally irrevelant. If I could sell my honey for $7,000 a pound, I'd only need one hive! Your lifestyle, your spouse's attitude toward risk, your dependent's needs all play into making a "living" from bees.

I wish you well.

Grant
Jackson, MO

[Andrew Dewey]

Grant's response is the voice of experience. I encourage you to listen to it and while you are at it check out his 25 Hives E-book.

The other consideration I'd make is the honey producing / bee growing potential for the area you live in. Find out what the historical per hive production of honey is for your area and then think about your ability to locate sufficient hives in that area to make a living.

Where I live ranks in the bottom 20% of honey producing areas in the US. While I can certainly dream of making a living from bees, it wouldn't be smart to bet the mortgage on it!

[Oldtimer]

In my country, the figure that's often quoted is 1,000 hives per man. However there are some beekeepers doing less than that, I know one guy living on 600 hives.

A way to live on bees with less investment is to not do honey but breed and sell bees and queens. you could probably get away with say, 100 hives plus a few thousand nucs, although these numbers are very variable depending just how you will run it. Less plant is needed due to not extracting honey.

Got to say though, down the years I've seen a lot of people get into bees and fail. For some reason people know that if you want to be a plumber you have to do a 3 year apprenticeship, but assume that you can start a beekeeping business with no experience and succeed.

If you want to have a bee business, I would recommend first working for a commercial beekeeper full time for one year at minimum. If you can't fit that in / make that work, you won't make your own beekeeping business work either.

I'd also suggest asking your question on the commercial forum.

[sqkcrk]

Grow your colony count as fast as your business abilities allow and you will find out the answer for yourself. That is the only way you will know. Each of us has our own abilities, desires, and drive. Beekeepers who are also businessmen w/ a lot of drive and determination/focus are the ones who find a way to reach their goals. Being a workaholic who knows how to keep bees is one way.

Best of luck.

[beeware10]

let your bees pay for increase. dont buy anything that will not pay for itself. the most important is dont borrow money depending on a honey crop to pay off the loan. taking an extra year or two will pay off. depending on your needs 500 hives would be min. bottle your honey for local markets will increase your income. working for a commercial guy would be your best education starting out. using someones else experence will save you mistakes and money. good luck

[max2]

Well said, Oldtimer! There is a lot of wisdom in those lines.
I have friends who are successful commercial beekeepers and I know that I'm not cut out to be one. I stick to my 20 or so hives and enjoy the work. I'm to old anyway. 20 hives keep me busy looking after, making gear, extracting and selling. It is a paying hobby and very enjoyable.
If I was a lot younger I would consider manufacturing and selling Beekeeping equipment or studying Entomology and specialising in bees - never commercial beekeeping!

[schmism]

Judging from other full time beeks

You need to do MUCH more than just sell honey.

you have to deal in a wax market durring the winter months. As with any raw material, the more you refine it the better price you get, but the more time you have in it. Could just sell cappings and wax from frames bulk by the pound. or refine it, melt it down , strain it and sell it in various size blocks, or go the next step and make candles.

You need to develop both proplis and pollen markets. Both are high value items that the bees will produce, but you have to develop the market for them.

Do all full time beeks deal with selling bees? I was under the impression most did not fool with 3lb packages or nucs as they spent enough time trying to develop there own splits etc to recoup losses and expand.

[Oldtimer]

No only a few sell significant numbers of bees.

[sqkcrk]

As with any raw material, the more you refine it the better price you get, but the more time you have in it. Could just sell cappings and wax from frames bulk by the pound. or refine it, melt it down , strain it and sell it in various size blocks, or go the next step and make candles.

You need to develop both proplis and pollen markets.

I would say to keep it simple. Concentrate on the bees and sell the honey and wax for as much as possible w/ the least amount of processing. Find what pollination one can and build those accounts, demanding a decent price for the service. Selling nucs, if there is a market, but mostly building up and maintaining your own numbers.

I know there are those who do make candles and sell pollen retail, but you have to be that person. Many of us aren't. Do what you do the best and leave the rest to others. Don't try to do everything.

[lazy shooter]

Commercial beeks are agriculturist. So many people want to be in one of the various forms of agriculture. The lure of working in the great out-of-doors and being independent (which you won’t be) draws many a person into agriculture.

I state the above so that you will understand the field is crowded. There are more wannabees than there are slots. Can you enter the field? Yes. Can you make a living? My favorite old cattle rancher/hay raiser friend says it thusly, “I don’t make a living, I live on what I make.” There is a lot of meat in that phrase for beginners. I don’t think you can earn a lot of money in beekeeping until you build a really big business. I would guess that if you remain a one man operation you will be lucky to ever see the north side of 50 grand. And to do that, I think you will have to specialize in some type of bees and sell lots of queens and nucs. It will take years to build your reputation and get the equipment In place.

I don’t want to rain on your parade, but I do want you to understand it will take time and lots of start up money to become a commercial beek. My advice would be to keep your day job and work a few hives as a sideline for a few years and learn how to keep bees and save a lot of money for wooden ware. This is something you can do and have an enjoyable life at the same time.

You can do it, but it will take a few years of sacrifice and learning. I’ve only been a hobbyist beekeeper for one year, so I could be full of it. Just remember, most new businesses fail because of lack of capital.

[TWall]

I worked for a number of years with farmers looking into alternative, high value-crops. My advice to them was only start out with what you can afford to lose. None ever lost it all. None ever made the maximum potential the first year or two. The most successful ones adapted crops to the market they developed. Some produced small amounts but direct marketed to the consumer for a relatively high price. Some produced higher acreages but marketed to a wholesale market.

Tom

[Acebird]

If you want to have a bee business, I would recommend first working for a commercial beekeeper full time for one year at minimum.

I am sure there is a lot of wisdom in your post but if you work for a commercial beekeeper full time how do you make a living? Is he going to support you? I think not.

[Oldtimer]

if you work for a commercial beekeeper full time how do you make a living?

Bit like any other job, you live on your pay.

[sqkcrk]

It is a business. Learn what you need to know about running a business. That, or learn the ropes as you go. Learning what someone elase thinks you should do as far as running a business is concerned may only discourage you from doing so.

[Barry Digman]

Never underestimate the value of diversification. If you can knock down say, $5,000-$10,000 per year off of bees and do it with a reasonable amount of time and effort you might be ahead to just invest that money in something else. Over a lifetime that kind of steady and diciplined savings may be worth more than trying to earn a living off of bees.

[Acebird]

Bit like any other job, you live on your pay.

I don't know anybody that does that besides me. It is not popular these days. Even with the economic crash.
But let's say I was willing to do that. How many commercial beekeepers could afford to hire someone full time? Can they keep someone fully employed just tending bees? I think they can't. I think a beekeeping business has a demand for man hours all at once just like farming and the rest of the time you have to find something else to do. You can't keep someone fully employed. And there is the nutshell, diversification like Barry says. What is a good marriage for a beekeeping business? What are you going to do when there ain't nothing to do?

[sqkcrk]

Acebird, Your range of experience relating to Commercial Beekeepers is too narrow. Many Commercial Operations have full time employees.