This post will be mostly thinking out loud. Comments will be appreciated though.
My reasons for keeping bees where twofold when I started. I'm a gardener and I have fruit trees and flowers that I wanted pollinated. I have a bad reaction to eating sugar but not from eating honey. I think we all have a sweet tooth to some degree.
After starting out with 2 nucs in 2012 I needed someplace else to keep my hives other than my regular sized yard. In 2013 I got permission from a market gardener to keep bees on his property(60 acres). Two splits went there. I only harvested 10 lbs of honey that year. This year I started to take care of another CSA'S bees on his property (23 acres) but 45 miles from my home. I also put one more hive at his place. It looks like I may only get 10-40 lbs of honey from there. The other place swarmed and I'm probably not going to harvest much from there.
The swarming hive this year produced 6 frames with queen cells on them. I made 6-4 frame nucs plus two OTS nucs. The nucs haven't done extremely well as I didn't feed them. They started on 5/1/14. Of the nucs 1 is down to 1 1/2 frames of bees and no brood. That one I'll probably shake out. 1 is up to 5 frames after having a second frame added later for them to requeen. 1 I new paper combined with a swarm I caught, it's doing well. 3 are doing very well and are getting up to having stores for the winter.
Of my other 3 hives they are 2 deeps with 1-3 supers strong. But they haven't seemed to stored much in the super. The 1 hive that has 3 supers really should only have 1 super. That hive I over estimated how well they were building comb and filling it in. Of these I'm probably going to split at least 2 of the three and see how that translates into production for next year.
So the reason for the title comes in after my history. I would like to harvest honey for my own use. So far that hasn't happened much. I do however seem to have a fair amount of success with keeping bees alive and making more bees. After 3 years with the bees I'm now aware that there are multiple measures of success in different areas of bee keeping. Next year I may try to sell nucs locally. At least a few to help cover my equipment costs. The bee club I'm in has a nuc and queen selling area in their web site. So that may help move this out of the hobbyist category and help me justify my expansions. Also there are quite a few farmers markets growers that I may rent out hives to. I'm about 100 miles from St. Louis, Mo and just past the suburban sprawl into a rural area.
Thanks for taking the time to hear about my thoughts.
My reasons for keeping bees where twofold when I started. I'm a gardener and I have fruit trees and flowers that I wanted pollinated. I have a bad reaction to eating sugar but not from eating honey. I think we all have a sweet tooth to some degree.
After starting out with 2 nucs in 2012 I needed someplace else to keep my hives other than my regular sized yard. In 2013 I got permission from a market gardener to keep bees on his property(60 acres). Two splits went there. I only harvested 10 lbs of honey that year. This year I started to take care of another CSA'S bees on his property (23 acres) but 45 miles from my home. I also put one more hive at his place. It looks like I may only get 10-40 lbs of honey from there. The other place swarmed and I'm probably not going to harvest much from there.
The swarming hive this year produced 6 frames with queen cells on them. I made 6-4 frame nucs plus two OTS nucs. The nucs haven't done extremely well as I didn't feed them. They started on 5/1/14. Of the nucs 1 is down to 1 1/2 frames of bees and no brood. That one I'll probably shake out. 1 is up to 5 frames after having a second frame added later for them to requeen. 1 I new paper combined with a swarm I caught, it's doing well. 3 are doing very well and are getting up to having stores for the winter.
Of my other 3 hives they are 2 deeps with 1-3 supers strong. But they haven't seemed to stored much in the super. The 1 hive that has 3 supers really should only have 1 super. That hive I over estimated how well they were building comb and filling it in. Of these I'm probably going to split at least 2 of the three and see how that translates into production for next year.
So the reason for the title comes in after my history. I would like to harvest honey for my own use. So far that hasn't happened much. I do however seem to have a fair amount of success with keeping bees alive and making more bees. After 3 years with the bees I'm now aware that there are multiple measures of success in different areas of bee keeping. Next year I may try to sell nucs locally. At least a few to help cover my equipment costs. The bee club I'm in has a nuc and queen selling area in their web site. So that may help move this out of the hobbyist category and help me justify my expansions. Also there are quite a few farmers markets growers that I may rent out hives to. I'm about 100 miles from St. Louis, Mo and just past the suburban sprawl into a rural area.
Thanks for taking the time to hear about my thoughts.