Cost per hive is the number that changes decisions
Most beekeepers know their total spend and their total income. Very few know which apiary is carrying the others, what a kilo of honey cost them to produce, or which hives lost money for two years running. The per-hive figure is the one that changes what you do next season.
A beekeeping business usually knows two numbers well: what came in this year, and what went out. Both are annual, both are aggregate, and neither tells you what to do differently next season. Decisions are never about the year. They are about one apiary that should be moved, one hive that should be combined, one category of spending that has quietly doubled.
Categories are the whole trick
The useful version of the same data is spend by category against yield by hive. Jars, feed, treatments, woodware and transport separated out; harvest recorded per hive at the extractor. Once those two exist you can see that one apiary produced forty per cent of the honey on a quarter of the feed, and that another has cost you money for two years running.
That is a decision: move the hives, change the site, or stop keeping bees there. It is not visible in an annual total, and it takes about a minute a week to record. In BeehiveMind every cost belongs to a category and to an apiary, and optionally to a hive, so the arithmetic is done for you: income against outgoings by month, by category, by site.
Cost per kilo, and what it is for
Divide a season's costs by a season's harvest and you have a cost per kilo. It is the number that sets a price you can defend. If a kilo cost you six to produce and the farm shop down the road sells at seven, you know something about the farm shop, or about your feed bill, that the annual total hid.
Done per apiary, the same division shows where honey is cheap to make. Done per hive, it shows which colonies are being subsidised by the others. The spread is nearly always wider than people expect: in thirty hives, two or three typically cost more than they return, and they are exactly the ones an average makes invisible. Weighing what came off each hive is the half of this that happens at extraction; the other half is the costs that were recorded against the same hives all season.
The four decisions the number makes
- Which apiary to expand and which to leave. Site quality shows up as honey per hive on feed per hive across a season, not on any single visit. Comparing sites is the same arithmetic with the site as the unit.
- Which hives to combine or requeen. A colony that took two feeds and a full treatment course and gave four kilos back has told you something, and it told you in the records rather than in March when it was dead.
- What the honey has to sell for. Cost per kilo, plus the margin you want, is the price. Everything else is guessing.
- Where the money went. Feed and treatments are the categories that creep. Seeing them by month, against the harvest they were meant to protect, is the difference between a habit and a decision.
What to record, and how little
The records that make this possible are short. A cost is an amount, a category, a date and an apiary; if it was one hive's queen or one hive's feed, the hive too. An income is the same with a product instead of a category. Harvest is kilos per hive at the extractor. None of it needs a spreadsheet, and all of it needs to be entered in the week it happened, because the receipts in the glovebox in November are how the annual total became the only number anyone knew.
The financial module keeps categories, costs and income per apiary and hive, and draws the month-by-month picture. If you are working out whether to start, or whether to grow, what beekeeping costs to start and per hive after that puts typical figures next to the ones your own records will replace them with.
Common questions
What categories should I track beekeeping costs in?
Enough to separate the decisions, no more. A working set is feed, treatments, equipment and woodware, queens and bees, packaging, transport and fuel, and fees or insurance. Income splits into honey by grade, other products such as wax, pollen or propolis, and nucs or queens sold. Every cost is tied to an apiary, and to a hive where it makes sense, which is what lets you divide later.
How do I work out cost per kilo of honey?
Add up everything the hives cost you over the season, including the feed and treatments you would rather not count, and divide by the kilos harvested in the same period. Done per apiary it tells you where honey is cheap to produce; done per hive it shows which colonies are subsidised by the others. Depreciate long-lived equipment over its life rather than charging it all to the year you bought it.
Is beekeeping profitable at a small scale?
At hobby scale, rarely, once equipment and your time are counted; the honey usually covers the running costs and not much more. Sideliners with a few dozen hives selling direct can make a real margin, and the margin lives in exactly the places a per-hive record shows: the apiaries that produce well on little feed, and the hives that should have been combined a year earlier. The honest answer is in your own records, not in anyone else's average.
Cost and income tracking in BeehiveMind »
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