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Wanting an opinion on a reasonable number of hives to learn the business with

6K views 35 replies 24 participants last post by  lharder 
#1 ·
Winter is coming and I know how I tend to make large plans, so I'm asking the Internet to help keep me on check. I'm looking for opinions on how many hives most people think is enough to be able to learn grafting, making increase, getting them through the winter, managing for production, and the marketing and sales side of the business, without getting in over my head too quickly. I have no plans to get involved with moving hives or pollination. I have zero desire to make and sell equipment, mostly looking at a business model of nucs and honey. Assume that labor time, land access, and capital are not limiting factors in expanding. What's a good size to build to and hang out for a couple of years really learning the ropes?
 
#2 ·
Do you have a full time job? I went from 16 my first year to 35 and now am at 55 10x10 and 20 5x5. I have a full time job so my time is limited to wknds and evenings. I plan on holding at my current number for a while. At this number I have plenty of resources to graft queens, make nucs, and make a little honey! I considered adding 20 more 10x10's but as the season comes to a close and the days are short I find myself yet again "chasing my tale" getting them put to bed for winter. I also have 3 kids, and enjoy bow hunting...although I don't remember their names and haven't made it to stand! LOL
 
#3 ·
I think your 10 hives should be enough to provide the resources to get you started. Soon after getting back into beekeeping I started accumulating 5-frame nuc equipment and I bought a Queen Castle.

I have added 4 more "queen castles" since then and have considerably more nuc equipment. I grafted queens for the first time this year and 16 new nucs are prepared for winter. A friend of mine contributed resources to the effort...

Resources (frames of brood, bees, honey, empty comb) will diminish quickly when you start to setup a cell builder or mating boxes. For me/us the mating boxes were 8 or 9 queen castles. Money would have diminished quickly too if I hadn't acquired material slowly.

I originally purchased queens for nucs that I overwintered. Then I tried a batch of VHS virgins in 2014. I almost bought cells this past season but thinking of the road trip across state, and the expense of the cells and gasoline pushed me to make the leap into grafting. My first grafting experience was a big success and I'm now planning on making a modest incubator for next year.

Selling a few nucs sure helps with paying for equipment and feed.

Using full sized frames uses up resources quickly but it's so easy to move them into their new home.

I'd decide what on what you wish to use for mating boxes and then plan (in both directions) from there...
 
#4 ·
I only work 4ish days a month. Otherwise I'm home with kids who are old enough to watch themselves for long stretches of time.

In every business there are points where the game changes. Like going from a backyard garden, to 3 acre garden, to cash renting 100 acres, to managing 5000 acres and employees.

I'm curious where those points are in beekeeping (roughly). It seems like it would be a good idea to grow to almost there, get good at that level, then jump up.
 
#5 ·
Beekeeping is not something to just jump into UNLESS you partner up with someone who knows all the ins and outs of every aspect of beekeeping. You can literally loose everything the first winter going at it blindly. I have a bee bud in Wisconsin who took the plunge and invested in 1000 hives. He did well, but he used them for pollinating up here and shipped them for pollinating almonds. It is his full time job now.
 
#6 ·
Personally, I'd suggest getting two to four hives with no expectations regarding making any money. Do it just to enjoy the bees, if you find you love it and are good at it, then think about expanding. Making money on bees is not easy, and in my opinion not the best reason to get into it.
 
#8 ·
At 10 hives you have enough resources to start learning other aspects of beekeeping such as grafting and queen rearing. Once you start and get the hang of it, the process becomes second nature. The one thing to keep in mind is that the process of making queens is just as addictive as beekeeping itself. After those first 10 or so queens come back mated up good and are kicking butt, it doesn't take long till you have to buy more equipment. :)

Jumping from one point to the next in beekeeping such as from hobbiest to sideliner can be done pretty quick, (cash and equipment depending), but it takes time to figure out how to manage the bees and not take much time doing it. Going from sideliner to pollinator/honey producer can go just as quick, but IMO can turn into some major time and effort above and beyond a sideliner.
 
#9 · (Edited)
Try growing your 10 to 50 next year, you will learn a lot that way.

edit: if you want details, let me know, but I'm in almost the exact same position as Huntingstoneboy, full time job, 2 kids and a baby, overwintered 20 hives or so last year, expanded to 60+, taking a few lumps now as I didn't put enough time into some of the late season splits and missed treating a few hives but drawn comb is gold and so is available equipment for next year since I was completely out this year and thinking of expanding to about 200 hives next year is making my head hurt and the wallet wants to get lost underneath the couch....
 
#10 ·
" enough to be able to learn grafting, making increase, getting them through the winter, managing for production, and the marketing and sales side of the business, without getting in over my head too quickly."

6-10 is enough to do all that. Expand a little bit every year until you decide it's either enough or you want to dive in farther. 6 don't take too much time, but doing everything 20 times turns it into a lot bigger job - especially processing honey. You can double your hive count by making increase every year and still make a honey crop - and know before it's too late that you are in as far as you want to go.

Here is about what I did (from memory)...
'09 - bought one package, split in July to 2
'10 split to 4 then reared my first queens in July to 10 - that's right, I began rearing queens with only 4 hives.
'11 increased from 10 to 20 and made my first honey crop (about 100 quarts)
'12 increase to about 27, made 200 quarts of honey - no winter losses up to spring of '12.
'13 increased to 33 made 250 quarts of honey
'14 sold my first nucs - 300 qts
current - 43 hives sold 25 nucs 400 qts

All from one package and some purchased queens, but I've had some good luck.

At this point I think around 50 is where I will stick. I hope this is helpful.
 
#23 · (Edited)
Didn't I read you had 10? 50's a long stretch(for the next year). Or, perhaps you are planning to buy a bunch of packages or nucs. Reading Davids post, it looks, (besides rearing queens) like a steady increase as I have tried to do. I wanted 20 going into winter this year, and have settled into 15. I feel like 20 would probably give me the flexibility as a "backyarder" to be sustainable as well as keep enough production hives to make a fair amount of surplus available on the local market. 20, has been my target, but, I can see that it could rise through no fault of my own. I will blame the addiction.:rolleyes: Wish you luck. G
 
#13 ·
Jumping in just to keep up with the thread. I've also been wondering the same thing concerning the amount of resources it takes to attempt queen rearing via grafting. I have enjoyed all of the learning in my first year. It truly has become addicting. I'm also excited about all the learning that is ahead concerning grafting, making increase, getting them through the winter, managing for production, and the marketing and sales side of the business. Thank you for raising this question Cheryl1!!
 
#15 ·
Yes thank you Cheryl for asking. I too am up for expanding and raising queens. I will be at 6+ hives next year and figure it will be another year before I have the resources to expand above 20.

The big question is space. I sit on 4 acres but only 1 is cleared so space may be an issue. I live in a residential area but will I have room for 20? How do I know how much land is enough or to little?
 
#16 ·
I will agree with 50. It is a large enough number you will see a decent return on if managed right. It is also a large enough number to test your beekeeping skill and also have resources (aka bees) available to fix a few hives if you do something wrong.

Basically I view this as a good number to run for profit, and see a real scale on profit/loss and time per hive that you can start scaling up to larger number of hives. Any smaller and you don have enough resources to do things properly, and I don't feel results from a smaller number of hives will scale up the same.
 
#19 ·
We went from 10 to 20, which was a pretty steep learning curve. Then 20 to 40 last year which wasn't bad and taught me to get much faster on inspections. Intended to go from 40 to 80 this year, selling off about 20 nucs and settling on 60 but ended up over shooting it and got up to about 120 with 80 - 100 on the ground for most of the spring and nucs going out steadily. Lost some because I just couldn't keep on them and sold off enough to get back to 60. Doubling hive counts allows for you to learn before the mistakes get too expensive. Keeping 40 is a lot different than keeping 10,
 
#20 ·
I think the "learning curve" of going from 20 to 40 or 40 to 80 is a lot more difficult than just "having" 100 that you do pollination services with.


what part of the business are you going to focus on?
Its my understanding there are commercial beeks who dont do much else other than pollination services and dont really mess with honey.

I know there are people that focus entirely on nucs/queens and dont really mess with honey or pollination.

I know there are people that do a little of everything..... have a few hives that service local orchards for pollination, but do specialty honey along with those pollination services (blueberry honey, or orange honey etc). They harvest pollen and sell it, they harvest wax and sell it, the do some nucs and raise some queens.


I think whats involved in learning and dealing with a "nucs and queens" business is a lot different than a "pollination only" business.
 
#21 · (Edited)
A friend who dove in about 5 years ago bought 100 hives with a partner. He is a contractor, so time is at a premium. His feeling was that 3 years experience with 30 to 40 hives would have been a good idea first. By is facial expression, I knew he'd lost some money at that point.

A year working for a commercial beekeeper is very educational - I have no clue if a mother could or should do it...? It probably would have more to do with pollination and building hive equipment anyways. If you could get commercial queen rearing experience, now THAT would help!

Several related threads have appeared over the last few years - each had a LARGE number of responses. One point I remember is a fellow in Florida saying, "I am blessed with a good job, and so I do this as a side business. I had but one goal - build it debt free."

My guess is that if you did choose to build your own hives and stayed focused on nucleus production and honey LATER ON, after the bees have afforded you a honey room, then yes it is a viable plan.

The "breaks" in this business go roughly as follows: enough to raise a few queens = more than 6 strong colonies; half-time work (before you become efficient at it) = 40 colonies; sideline honey/candle business = 150 colonies (more or less - that is highly dependent on area, year, etc.); queen rearing / nuc business = 400 to 600 colonies; full-time business (pollination / honey / nuc's) = 700 to 1,000 colonies per person. This is just what I've seen, it is not the 11th Commandment, so realize that its just a rough guide. Others in the business will correct me and that will be helpful to both of us.

Stuff to consider...if you think on this a bit, how it applies to your situation, please post what your thoughts are. I could give you an equipment list that you could price out and make up a business plan / spreadsheet kind of thing.

Growing such a business "organically", meaning by splits, queen rearing, and nuc's, would take quite a long time, during which all the work is there and little profit is realized. A formal business plan is to help you get financed. If it seems a little intimidating, you probably know someone who could help you with a rough draft.

Start by getting an idea how many colonies your area can support on a good year, and on a dry year. Some areas are good for making honey, others for pollination, some are just better off keeping 2 colonies and starting a wooden ware business.

Next thing to consider is if you are actually going to make it a formal business. If so, I'd go take a class in accounting. That's what I did when I started my tree service. I can no longer climb, so I'm positioning myself for beekeeping and other activities. Those accounting classes give me a lot of credibility with the angel investors! Mr. Beeman's point, partnering with an experienced person, gives one a whole bunch of credibility in getting financed. This is going against the idea of building the business debt free, but it does turn you in to a profitable operation when a good year presents itself. Start writing a plan now, build up to 30 or 40 hives for 3 years, then decide.

Once you've decided, be ready to stay flexible and go with the year's best bet. If it's a wet year, gear up for honey. A dry year, sell woodenware. Your bees booming and increasing too fast for you? Sell nuc's, wax products, honey. Are you good at sewing? Sell bee suits! I remember counting 27 different ways to make money in the bee business (there's probably 27 more). Honey was one of the most expensive to start into. Buying in with my mentor was the best bet for that.
 
#22 ·
A little more on my thoughts-I'm not interested in pollination at this point. I will not go into debt. I know how to handle accounting in a business as we already have a large farm. My rough idea of the future at this point is to keep a home yard for nuc production and have out yards for honey production. My current contribution to the household income is less than 20k a year so anything I make on bees is just gravy. (Whenever I am finally done reinvesting all the money and growing the operation anyway :)

A beekeeping business would be something for me to do that I enjoy more than nursing, a vehicle for teaching entrepreneurship to the kids, and $$ for vacations and motorcycle track days.

I don't get into anything though without knowing what the next step is, and the consensus seems to be growing from 10 to 50ish is the best next goal.
 
#26 ·
For me the first and hardest jump so far is around 20 hives. At that point, in my area after 20 you need to have a second bee yard. That means adjusting to know what to carry in your vehicle, tools, supers, etc. and also having to plan and travel to work them. Whereas when they are all at your home location, you can deal with them on a whim.

At 10 hives I went from shaking the bees off of capped frames to using fume boards.

At about 15 hives I went from doing frame by frame inspections every time to just looking until i see nice white brood, eggs and no queen cells. Only going deeper if I see a problem during this process.

Also so at about this level, I found that swarm prevention becomes more difficult and accept that my hives will throw some swarms. (Remember I do not fully inspect unless there are apparent problems.). ( I am a part time sideliner so time is scarce.

Then there is the harvesting. Everyone's labor threshold is different. At 20 hives producing,as a conservative 60# of honey each running mediums means you need to extract about 300 or so frames of honey. At that rate, a small extractor is necessary and a larger one desirable. I think the next big move is going to pallets. Which means mechanized equipment to move them around, trailers, etc. I imagine at about 50 you start thinking about a motorized dolly to move hives around, say two hives to a pallet. At 100 hives you would need an uncapper, pump, clarifier, etcetera. At pallet lift truck, etc would become necessary. Drum heaters, bottling equipment. Planning for these changes should be done if you expect to move in that direction, otherwise what you do today may useless when you scale up.

So I like this thread, and it would be helpful if those that have been there could comment more directly as to when they had to make these order of magnitude steps.
 
#27 ·
Build a business with what you already have. If it turns out you can't, then you will know what to do next. You don't have to expand your base. Just use it to the maximum of its potential. I have a friend who makes consistently more honey per hive than I do. Twice and three times as much. He intensively works his hives, checker boards them. Try that a few years and see what comes next.
 
#28 ·
I have a forklift and trailers already. If I have enough hives make it through the winter to have some dedicated production hives I was thinking of placing them in an out yard on pallets so they could be moved easier. I also have access to an extractor from a friend who no longer keeps bees. It'll just cost me some honey to use his. I don't have any uncapping tanks, etc though.
 
#29 ·
OK, so a nuc' yard and a honey yard, and build it slow, debt free. Smart girl! :)

A total between 300 and 500 colonies allows you enough colonies to really grade and select from the best, and have enough resources to make the nucleus colonies. That will be a few years down the road, but to get an idea, here's what I'd go about getting for equipment.

I started out making a queen bank frame and a bunch of Henry Alley-type queen cages. They are the easiest to produce - just a 1.5" hole through a 2.25" x 2.25" x 3/4" block, screens stapled on to both ends of the hole, and a 7/16" hole drilled in from the side with a small cork to close it.

My queen bank frame holds 2 shelves with 2 rows each of 14 Alley cages. That's a temporary holding tank for 56 queens, a little bit bigger than a 48-cell queen cell frame. I put a screen of 1/2" hardware cloth over it so the cages don't fall out when handling them.
The screen hinges up to get the boxes out. The attendant bees can go right through the 1/2" mesh.

I consider robbing screens an absolute necessity of beekeeping. You go into winter with a lot more bees if you have them and use them.

I made a run of Laidlaw queen introduction cages. It's a wooden rectangle made of 7/8" square wood. The outside is 6" x 8", but you can adjust this so it fits in a bee box neatly if you wish. The top is covered with #8 hardware cloth, and to the inside perimeter is attached a strip of 1" sheet metal such that it protrudes 3/8" below the bottom of the wooden rectangle.

A flat section of comb is selected that has mostly empty cells an/or emerging brood, with a small patch of honey and pollen. The frame is brushed clear of bees, and the mated queen is placed under the Laidlaw cage, then the protruding metal strip is pushed into the comb until the the wood bottoms out against he comb.

There is no candy release in a Laidlaw cage, the beekeeper releases the queen when he/she sees there is no aggressive action - an attack "ball" - over the queen. When they are instead feeding the queen under the cage, the beekeeper releases the queen.

You'll probably have 3 kinds of nucleus boxes - small mating nuc's, 5-frame increaser nuc's, and waxed cardboard nuc's for sales. Many beekeepers use "queen castles" -4-way mating nuc's that fit in a standard box over a strong colony separated with a double screen board. Others think the odd-sized frames are a PITA, so they prefer 3 standard frames for mating nuc's. Your decision, ultimately.

I made a few Pritchard boxes for isolating breeder queens on 1 to 3 combs. They are there to make sure I know where to find exactly the right-aged larvae when it's queen rearing time. They are also portable, which is a help when I can grab it from the breeder colony, place it in an empty nuc', and leave it right outside the grafting tent (though I use it for Miller method, Jay Smith method, and Jenter box method as well as Doolittle's grafting method).

The Pritchard box has wooden ends and bottom, with queen excluder sides. It's wide enough for 3 frames and 4 bee spaces (4-1/2"), and hangs in a deep box. The frames are medium depth, but a bit shorter than standard. (The Pritchard box hangs like a regular frame, the frames hang in it). I make a top out of thin plywood and sheet metal that fits tightly. This is just a convenience, and only reduces panic when I can't find the right aged larvae.

Of course each colony will need a feeder, or perhaps more than one type. A Miller-type feeder works well in the warm months. Bucket feeders do better in the cold months. Liquid feed is not used during the freeze.

A Cloake Board may or may not make sense to you. With the insertion of a board, it changes from a queen excluder to a shut-off valve. Board in makes the upper box into a queenless starter. Pull it out the next day, its a queenright finisher. Queen rearing was never easier.

Feeder rims for patties are a convenience, you might elect to make them.

A super horse will save your back. It is a sawhorse with a rectangle top. The rectangle happens to be just wide enough for 2 or 3 supers. Make it just low enough that it helps, but so you can stack 2 or 3 supers high and still get them off again.

While moving from 10 up to 100 hives, a 6-frame, 12" tall, ventilated, queenless starter/finisher box is an awesome way to go. Just make 8 to 20 queen cells at a time (20 at the peak of the season, fewer early or later) every 11 days. The queen cells go into the nuc's for 22 days, then on into 5-framers. (Hint: at least 2 sets of 20 nuc's per queen box.)

still editing - kilo
 
#30 ·
For more of Kilo's excellent input, check out http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?318802-larger-queens

I've been mentally collecting all this info preparing to create a plan for next year. It is really nice to have something that I assume works in one place.

Not to single anyone out, a big thank you to everyone that contributes to these forums. The variety of opinions and options are better than most of the books that, although being good, are generally location specific and that generally for the North.

I'm at 6 hives now. I just committed to purchase equipment for another 6 for next year. Now I have to find a location to put them; residential Houston isn't the best place for that many bees. :) I figure if I can double each year it will allow for a reasonable learning curve on all fronts.
 
#31 ·
X2 - I love KC's thoroughness, and willingness to share!

Having been up & down the road of "beekeeping, as a business", I suspect that 50 hives begins to give one a feel for all the pitfalls & miscalculations that might occur.

While some boast 3x growth in colony numbers in a single year, a more realistic plan might be 2x for a few years. Grow & learn, grow & learn. The pitfalls are a little less painful on a small scale. One drought year, when 75 colonies bring in 35 lbs of honey (TOTAL!), can be quite the wake-up call.

'Good thing I had a "real job" ...:rolleyes:
 
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