Starting a beekeeping business: the numbers that decide whether it pays

Most beekeepers who wonder whether bees could be a business already know the honey sells. The real question is whether it sells for more than it costs, across enough hives, to be worth the lifting, the driving and the weekends. The answer depends on a few numbers that are easy to write down and rarely are: what one hive costs to run, what it returns, and what you can charge. This is how to put them together before hive twenty rather than after it.

Where the money comes from

• Honey in jars. The largest income for most small businesses, and worth far more per kilo sold direct at markets, farm gates and independent shops than sold in bulk to a packer.
• Bulk honey. Easy to sell in quantity and paid by weight, at a fraction of the jar price. It suits a big harvest, not a margin.
• Nucleus colonies and queens. In spring, demand for local nucs often outruns supply, and a well-made nuc can earn more than the honey the same colony would have produced.
• Wax, propolis and pollen. Small on their own, worthwhile once there is a product to put them in: candles, balms, food wraps.
• Pollination. Where orchards or field crops need bees, growers pay a fee per hive for the weeks of flowering. It is steady money, hard on the colonies, and entirely dependent on local demand.

What it costs per hive

The running costs of a hive, feed, treatments, frames, queens and jars, are covered in what beekeeping costs per hive, and commonly come to forty to a hundred dollars a year before losses. A business adds the costs a hobby hides: fuel and a vehicle for out-apiaries, an extraction room that meets food rules, public and product liability insurance, labels that meet labelling law, market fees, and replacement colonies for the ten to twenty per cent lost in an ordinary winter. Equipment wears out, too, so a share of its price belongs in every year's costs.

How many hives it takes

Here is a worked example, with round numbers in whatever currency you use. A hive gives 20 kilos of honey in an ordinary year, sold direct at 12 a kilo: 240. Its running costs are 70, and its share of the vehicle, the extraction room and the insurance another 40, so it nets 130. Thirty such hives net 3,900 before your time. A hundred net 13,000, if the extra hives find forage, the extra honey finds buyers and the extra work finds hours in the week.

The example is not a forecast, and your figures will differ; that is the point of it. Replace every number with your own and the result tells you how many hives the income you want would take, and whether the forage and the market around you can carry that many. It usually also shows that the first improvement is not more hives but more from the ones you have.

Pricing honey

Price from the bottom up. Divide a year's costs by the kilos you sold to get your cost per kilo, then look at what local honey sells for in jars at markets and independent shops, not in supermarkets, where blended imported honey sets a price no small producer should chase. Raw, local honey is the reason people buy from a beekeeper, and it carries a premium; single-flower honeys such as heather or a particular tree species carry more.

Shops that buy to resell expect a discount from your market price, so set the market price with room for it. Keep the jar sizes few and the prices round: a customer compares the jars on your table, not the price per gram.

The rules that come with selling food

Selling honey brings obligations that vary by country and often by region. They commonly include registering as a food business with the local authority, labelling every jar with the product name, the weight, the country of origin, a best-before date and your name and address, extracting in a clean space that meets hygiene rules, and in some places registering each apiary. Insurance for public and product liability is usually a condition of selling at markets. Your beekeeping association and local food authority will know the local version; ask before the first sale, not after the first complaint.

Keep the books per hive

A business total tells you whether the year paid. Per-hive figures tell you what to change: the sites that produce on the least feed, the colonies that should have been combined, the queens that should be replaced, and the price that actually covers a kilo. Weighing the harvest per hive and costing each hive turn the example above from a guess into your own numbers within one season, and the financial module keeps costs and sales by category so the year's figures are ready when you need them.