I came from a systems analysis background, so you can imagine my surprise when I found out that farmers work in the millions of dollars, without a strategy, without a plan for success, and without any farm management SOPS. In apiary farm management

• I watch farms get sold because no one looked into a trust.
• I watched beekeepers go out of business because they refused to hire help.
• I watched families split up farms without realizing that if they kept the farm, hired a manager, they would all have 10x more money in 20 years.
• I watched managers lose employees because they would not learn ‘best HR practices.’

Yes, I watched all of this in my own family, because my family comes from a farming background.

As you probably guessed, this thread of blog posts is not going to be about making you feel good. It is going to help you learn how to do apiary farm management (small farm, hobby farm, vegetable growing enterprise, or livestock business) successfully and make money.

Benefits of Apiary as a Farm Business

There are a lot of benefits to starting to farm as an apiarist.

               Financial Investment

• Beekeepers do not need to own a farm.
• The cost of an initial hive is cheap compared to buying livestock.
• Bees reproduce quickly. You can turn 1 hive into 3 within 1 year.
• No heavy equipment is needed for the first few years.
• Canada has a production deficit of 26million pounds of honey in Canada. There is room for everyone to succeed.
• One person can manage enough hives to earn a mid level income.
• It is easy to build a beekeeping business while you hold a full time job.
• There is always 6 months off for hobbyists, and 1 – 2 months off in the winter for sideliners.
• You can learn 90% of what you need to know by watching YouTube, attending OBA conferences, and joining a local beekeeping club.
• You can sell honey wholesale/Bulk, or market your own brand/label.

My Good Enough is NOT good Enough

The farming industry, of which apiculture is a part, has spent too many decades following practices that worked in the 1950s, but are long out of date. If you want to start a successful apiculture business, whether it is honey production, or bee breeding, then you need to learn how to generate money by apiary farm management.

No – the bees do not generate money. They make a product. How you handle that product makes the difference between you generating an income or becoming wealthy.

This is your future. You will be investing a lot into this enterprise, either in time, or in money.

To grow a beekeeping business you will be sacrificing vacations, and ‘extras’, as you collect equipment and buy boxes. You will never have enough honey supers (deeps, bee boxes).

One thing that will sabotage your success is making mistakes because you lacked to strategies, methods, and techniques needed to succeed.

The next thing is to not budget out HOW your business will grow. How many boxes can you buy a year. Should you go in debt, or dip into investment? These are questions individual to each commercial beekeeper

Failure to Plan is a Plan to Fail

There is no such thing as Hands Free beekeeping. Successful Farming, like with any livestock, requires data collection, solid management practices, constant learning and re-education.

It is important to develop a proactive beekeeping method. It is too late to start asking beekeepers at your local club how to identify a disease when you have 100 hives.  I estimate that I spend 800 – 100 hours a year watching youtube videos, reading, or otherwise learning. Then I attend bee meetings, conferences, etc.

Knowledge is Power – You do not know how to create a good strategy if you don’t have the all of the facts.

Hobby Beekeeper

Usually has 1 – 10 hives.  They enjoy the bees and the time they spend beekeeping.

These beekeepers can be a benefit to the beekeeping community if they learn to keep their bees healthy.

Serious Beekeeper

These beekeepers have up to 10 hives, attend the conferences, and learn the art of beekeeping.

These beekeepers like the ‘beekeeper’s life’ but may not want the job as a beekeeper.

Sideliner

This beekeeper is a starter commercial beekeeper. They keep a lot of hives, but still have a day job.  They can also have enough beehives to qualify as commercial beekeepres, apply for government grants and tax write offs.

Commercial Beekeeper

In Ontario, having over 100 hives makes you a commercial beekeeper. However, under our business model we consider 300 hives as our break even point, and 500 hives is our ‘goal’.

Bee Genetics

It will not be long before you need to take a look at your livestock. Yes, in Ontario, bees have the rights and protections of any livestock.

You may be sitting at Toronto Pearson Airport waiting for a shipment of packages to come in. Or, your next generation of queens.

These are things you should start exploring right from the beginning. It can be expensive to change everything later on.

A word of caution, not a breeds, or strains of mutts are the same. They may respond differently to the weather, flora and fona, in your area. Do your research before in how to apiary farm management and spending thousands brining in bees.

Queen Rearing – Research and Experiment

Beekeepers are by default researchers. When you have enough hives you will always have ‘that yard’, or ‘those hives’. These are the ones where you are trying new things, experimenting, testing new techniques.

Successful beekeepers, based on my observations, are the ones who keep records. We number our hives. This lets us track strong hives, which ones requeened themselves quickly, which ones we requeened, strong hives, weak hives, good producers, good layers, etc.

This data is the foundation for the solutions to your problems. One of the most common asked questions is, ‘how do I’ or ‘what do I do’ when something goes wrong.

Knowledge, and your own experimentations, will give you the answers. It will also allow you to become a proactive beekeeper instead of a reactive beekeeper.

Beekeeping 101 – Collect Data

In the last 10 years there are two constants with the successful beekeepers. They either have enough money to buy new bees in the spring. Or, they collect data and develop a pro-active beekeeping strategy.

Example, when we weighed the cost of feeding bees through the winter, and feeding the best food, against the cost of even 10% higher bee loss, we found that feeding reduced loss by 20%. Over 100 hives, that reduced the nucs we needed to buy by $5000 per 100 hives.

Fondant is $7 per hive. That is $140. Leaving a profit of $4860 per 100 hives.

Honey Production

First – learn the government guidelines. There are rules that govern how you produce honey depending on whether you are selling it ‘farm gate’ or at local fairs, or to grocery stores. What is the cost of bottling, labels, shipping, handling. Once you know these costs then you will realize that $18 a bottle of honey is not $18 profit, but $18 – bottle $1 – Label $1 – labour $2 – waste in processing $1 – shipping $2 etc = $11 per pound of honey.

Second – determine the best cost effective way to package your honey. For us, this is in bulk. Other people prefer to bottle and sell from the farm gate.

Third – learn how to market your honey. They best way to do this is to learn what marketing is, brand your product, and then talk to other beekeepers about honey marketing.

Agriculture Accounting

There is more to determining whether you made $11 a bottle of honey. What is the true cost? This includes wear and tear on your vehicle, the cost of bottling equipment, The cost of your bees including feed, treatment, replacement, and paying land leases.

When we include these expenses, that bottle of honey only makes us about $4.00. We can sell bulk, have them pick up the barrels, and not need to filter, for $3.50. Our profit is about $3.10. That is only $900 extra dollars for each 1000lb of honey. But, for us, it is the time savings that makes it more cost effective to sell bulk. We have no loans. We do not need to buy or lease space for an extraction line. We do not need to spend all our spare time bottling, or paying someone to bottle.

You cannot succeed if you don’t know how much profit you are making, or how much risk you can afford to take in apiary farm management.