# how long to grow to 300 a month profit



## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

Hello folks. Say that if I was lucky(or good enough) to keep my bees alive and starting with two hives, over time, how long would it be before I could expand to making a profit of at least 250 dollars a month on average(3,000 a year). I realize that more than likely most months would be spent bringing in no money and surely even losing it. Acquiring land would not be a problem. I have access to a 500 acre abandoned farm, a one hundred acre abandoned farm about an hour away, and a 9 acre plot about an hour away from the other two places. Time is not an issue as me and my longtime girlfriend have no kids and she makes enough money to be able to support us both(yes, I am a bum with no job-but am not afraid of work). She also has many contacts (alot of whom are foodies) that I am quite sure would buy honey from us. I don't need to make alot of money, just enough to justify me getting into the business of it. I am not afraid to go out and find ways of selling honey (I worked in the beer distribution business for six years in delivery and sales) and my girlfriend is a marketer herself in the pharmaceutical industry. I believe I can gain access to a honey extractor from the start. Eventually i would like to be able to breed and sale nucs of bees. I live in WV but most of the land I would have access too is in the southwest section of Virginia right down the road from me.


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## shinbone (Jul 5, 2011)

How much beekeeping experience do you now have, i.e., how many hives for how many years?


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

I am a newbie with only one hive I installed in May.


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

Depends on how you want to hedge your bets. You could sell nucs, but that's like selling 2-3 nucs a month to hit that target. Compound that to about 6 months of people wanting nucs, so that's 4-6 nucs per month. So, with 12 hives, I'm betting you could hit that target if you spread the sales out. With bees though, sometimes it's better to capitalize early in the season and selling in bulk, but that would mean overwintering about 40 nucs which kind of changes the approach. If you find you have good honey flows, it would be better to just hedge your bet there and keeping 12 strong colonies for honey production and selling off any splits for swarm prevention for guaranteed income. There are risks though, say if your hives swarm or the bloom is a bust then you're really in a bind.

It always comes down to how you overwinter and start the year though too. If you keep your bees alive and they come out of winter strong, then the options available are much better than losing half your bees or having a bunch of weak colonies come out of winter that you have to then baby the rest of the year and miss out on splits and honey anyways.


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## Broglea (Jul 2, 2013)

You still need to learn about bees. Probably take you 5 years to profit $300 a month. Probably take take longer.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

4 years.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

thanks for the input everyone


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## SWM (Nov 17, 2009)

Below are 3 things I strongly suggest:
1. Hang on to your Girlfriend!
2. Hang on to your Girlfriend!
3. After 3 full seasons of beekeeping, revisit this idea and see if it still makes sense.

Wishing you the best...


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## squarepeg (Jul 9, 2010)

the first year you are in the hole with the expense of the bees and equipment. if all goes well you have a chance in the second year to recoup what you spent in the first year. if all continues to go well you have a chance in the third year to make some money back. a recent poll showed that $300 - $500 per hive per year is doable for most.

this would mean you would want to be running 15 - 20 hives.

there are some one time start up expenses that have to be factored in like suit, tools, extractor, ect.

you can mitigate some of the expenses by catching swarms, propagating your own bees, and building your own equipment if you have cheap/free lumber available along with access to a wood shop.

laferney's '4 years' would be a good working assumption.


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## Fusion_power (Jan 14, 2005)

I know how to make a small fortune with bees. It is not at all difficult, all you have to do is start with a large fortune!

A consistent profit of $300 per month selling honey retail infers revenue of about $1200 per month or $14,400 per year. That works out to roughly 3000 pounds of honey give or take depending on retail price. Somewhere between 30 and 50 well managed colonies could do the job. With enough skill, you could hit 50 colonies in 2 years by splitting the bees you have and purchasing some packages. Your investment in woodenware, extractors, supplies, etc would be about $15,000. A lot of the value of your operation would have to come from "sweat equity" where building your own keeps cost down. I am building up to 28 colonies by year end from 15 at the start of the year and in the process converting entirely to new equipment. My costs will be around $3000 since I am doing all the assembly work.

A better method of making $14,400 per year would be to build up to 50 colonies and then sell nucs in the spring. Combining nucs with honey would give a bit of diversity and allow you to expand larger if you chose.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

SWM said:


> Below are 3 things I strongly suggest:
> 1. Hang on to your Girlfriend!
> 2. Hang on to your Girlfriend!
> 3. After 3 full seasons of beekeeping, revisit this idea and see if it still makes sense.
> ...


Haha, I plan on it as long as she will put up with me.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

I figured it would take some time and depend on how I went about it. I'm not in it just to make money, the bees interest me. I'd just like to see if it really is possible to start a business from scratch(not needing to be loaded with money or have to take out loans) and make it self sustaining. I've already failed twice with other attempts at building a business from nothing, so letdowns are nothing new to me. I've got around 1000 board feet of lumber laying around and the tools to build with so I don't really need to invest in buying hives in the beginning. My uncle has an extractor so I wont need to go buy one of those until he gets sick of me using it. I have access to 3 separate yards which I've thought about utilizing all three so if I have a die off at one hopefully there will be an unaffected yard to build back from. I just need to figure out the cost of fuel and vehicle wear, and my time traveling from one to the other to see if it will be worth it or not. I know I'm basically a rookie with only one hive and have alot to learn about keeping bees alive and that's my number one priority, but I find if I start thinking of things way ahead of time and ask questions that it reduces the surprise factor.


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Even if you make everything else you should use standard frames if you ever hope to make money with it. Expand your colony count aggressively for a while, but to make honey or sell nucs you have to back off on that some. In otherwords split a lot for 3 years or so - while eating all of the expense of woodenware, sugar and meds - and then try to make a honey crop the next year while splitting less aggresively. With a little luck you will be income positive starting then. But it all depends on getting healthy bees through the winter alive every year. That's the key.

You also need to be the kind of person who can work hard today for a paycheck that won't come for a long time, and then you have to be able to hang onto some of that money until you spend it on supplies when you need them months later. If you aren't like that now, chances are that keeping bees won't really make you like that later. 

Good luck.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

David LaFerney-Thanks for the advice. Why standard frames?


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## David LaFerney (Jan 14, 2009)

Standard size at least, but for most people it just isn't worth building your own frames - too many fiddly parts. Standard size because 1) You can sell them in nucs - not much market for oddball equipment. 2)They fit store-bought supers - and extractors. If you make a go of it, sooner or later you will probably want to buy some equipment instead of making every piece of it by hand - really unless you are using free material and/or value your time not at all it doesn't even make *much* $ense to build supers. Even if you are underemployeed now, when you become a prosperous beekeeper you won't be then, and your time will have a value - you want to keep the option of buying woodenware someday. So standard sizes all around. Also, someday you might want to sell out your then valuable beekeeping business and retire off the hefty profit you bank - but guess what? No one will buy it in oddball equipment.

Trust me - pick a size, any size, as long as it's one of the standards. If making money is your stated goal then you should probably go with 10 frame deeps all around. Take care of your back though. Beekeeping is hard work.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

Yes sir, I don't plant on building the frames, only the bodies, tops, and bottoms. I've heard that the trend is that many people are getting away from deeps and into hives that consist of nothing but mediums. What I've been thinking is that I would buy a medium hive kit from someone like Brushy Mountain and model all the dimensions of the hives I build off it. But if using 10 frame deeps exclusively makes a difference in money being brought in, I will strongly consider that.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

Dimensions of all hive body components (well, for 10 frame hives) are available in these free plans:
http://www.beesource.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/10frlang.pdf

Plans for many other beekeeping related items are also in the _Build-It-Yourself_ section:
http://beesource.com/build-it-yourself/


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## johnbeejohn (Jun 30, 2013)

Trust me and my back that has been messed up since I picked a full deep of honey of the grounda deep honey super full of honey is 90 lbs I use deeps for brood and mostly mediums for supers mostly


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Don't want to pick up that heavy 90 lbs then put 4 frames into a 2nd hive box for a small operation.
Beekeeping is not for taking the short cut route. But the honey is worth the extra effort.
It takes me 4 years without a mentor to finally found my way into the bee world. Keeping the mites in check
is the first step. And keeping 2 hives instead of one will help when one is in trouble. At least this
way you can compare both to see how fast they grow. I'm sure your uncle can serve as a mentor with valuable
advice and experience along the business aspect of it too. Ask him how he did it.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

beepro-yea, I went over to my uncle's last week and caught him checking his hives. I watched and helped a bit. he's not really keen on teaching much about them though. he's not the type to invite you over when he is getting in them either. I think he just likes to do that stuff alone. I've tracked down two other beekeepers that live closer and they seem to be about the same. One of those claimed he had been keeping bees for 50 years and then went on to tell me that you couldn't tell the difference in drone cells and worker cells, the other one was mostly interested in selling me stuff. I think I'll probably bee learning on my own too.


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## Joe Hillmann (Apr 27, 2015)

If you build everything from lumber you already have/can get for free, including the frames and go foundationless you could be making $3000 a year by the second summer.

Start off buying two nucs. The first summer keep making splits till you are up to ten hives. Hopefully can get most of them through the winter. The next summer split them again until you have about 12 hives. If you can get 50 pounds of honey per hive times 12 hives that is 600 pounds of honey. If you can sell it at farmers markets for $8 a pound subtract $1 per pound for packaging so that makes it $7 per pound going back to you. $7 x 600 pounds is $4200.

Of course of those 12 hives there is a good chance a couple won't survive or produce much honey. You may also need to buy sugar for feeding and medication/equipment to treat for mites and other problems. You also may need to build a fence which if you are setting your bees up on a farm that already has an electric fence you could set up for nothing but if you need to buy everything including a charger and battery could cost as much as $300- $400 per location you have bees. You also need a smoker, a jacket/veil and gloves.

I you decide to buy frames and foundation and go with 10 medium for all your boxes you will need about 50 frames per hive. With 12 hives that is 600 frames. If the frames with foundation are around $2.50 each that comes out to around $1500 for frames and foundation.


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## ethanhogan (Jun 1, 2016)

I just wanna meet the lady that pays for all your equipment, lets you live with her, and supports you for free!! she got a sister, cousin, or someone that will just let me bum around and beekeep for FREE?? Sounds like a great gig. I would follow previous advice and hold on to her haha


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## Stephenpbird (May 22, 2011)

buffaloeletric said:


> I am a newbie with only one hive I installed in May.


 One hive, that's your first mistake as a beekeeper.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

Beekeepers get regular monthly income?


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

Stephenpbird said:


> One hive, that's your first mistake as a beekeeper.


Off the topic, but I notice you are from Baden. I spent a whole summer tracing my family back to it's roots and the trail stopped in Baden.


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

ethanhogan said:


> I just wanna meet the lady that pays for all your equipment, lets you live with her, and supports you for free!! she got a sister, cousin, or someone that will just let me bum around and beekeep for FREE?? Sounds like a great gig. I would follow previous advice and hold on to her haha


she has a brother if your interested?


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## ethanhogan (Jun 1, 2016)

Tempting but I'll have to pass ha


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## buffaloeletric (Mar 11, 2010)

ethanhogan said:


> Tempting but I'll have to pass ha


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## ethanhogan (Jun 1, 2016)

Eventually my wife will support my hobby hahaha but I'm not holding my breath


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## beepro (Dec 31, 2012)

Well, her brother can meet your sister then. So why pass on that introduction, huh?
I'm sure siblings don't let the other one fail, right.


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## cheryl1 (Mar 7, 2015)

I don't get support from my brother but my husband sure has been handy with the checkbook. I keep waiting to fire up the computer and find that mann lake is now a restricted website 

If you put in a ton of learning time, make as much of your own equipment as possible, are a decent salesperson, and have great luck.....a few years.


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## jim lyon (Feb 19, 2006)

I understand that many are working with limited funds and for some building their own equipment is also a labor of love. I would, however, strongly recommend that most should at least buy precut frames and keep to standard hive dimensions if they hope to ever sell nucs or want their investment to have the possible resale value.


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## JoshuaW (Feb 2, 2015)

I live in Deeps-land and started with all mediums. Then I had a chance to sell a few nucs in Deeps-land. Guess how many nucs I sold? Guess what standard size brood box I'm adding this year?


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## ethanhogan (Jun 1, 2016)

I am in the same boat josh but I am just running 8 frame deeps now so I can run deep nucs and deep brood boxes. I run all 8 frames mediums now but I am getting cypress 8 frame deeps for next year


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## cerezha (Oct 11, 2011)

I think, right now, small bee-business has chances to be profitable:
people aware of local raw honey for which they ready to pay premium price; selling nucs can work - many people interested in starting beekeeping. From another hand, the bee-learning curve is quite steep - 3-4 years, probably. It is strange that your beekeepers are so closed. My experience is opposite - all beekeepers I met are great open people ready to share their expertise. Good luck with your plans!


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