# Honey House Plans?



## justin (Jun 16, 2007)

from a builders standpoint 24' is pretty narrow. including your roof pitch it wouldn't leave much room above either. if it's a budget thing i'd go wider and less long. justin


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## Mtn. Bee (Nov 10, 2009)

Can't Justin as the only place I have to build is between house and property line! Small city lot in town but great location to sell honey, bee supplies/equipment, wooden ware, etc. also located along truck route so could get to location with a big rig if needed.
I might be able to squeeze the buildings walls out to 26' ??? I am going to talk to the builders about there thoughts before making the final decisions!


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## Mtn. Bee (Nov 10, 2009)




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## kilocharlie (Dec 27, 2010)

1. *KEEP THE PUBLIC OUT OF THE WORK AREA!!!* That part is the separate building.

2. You might like a drive-in garage door for unloading out of the sun / rain. It could save using a dolly. 

3. Setup depends on size of your operation. How many hive are you running? How many people in your operation? I was just in this exact discussion with my main advisor (a 40-year beekeeper) this morning. 

Sideliners tend to run 50 to 200 colonies. A 400 to 550 hive operation usually uses two 60 or 75-frame extractors, a pump, and a large settling tank set above a table tall enough for a food-grade barrell to go under. At about 1,000 hives, you look into as much fully-automatic equipment as you can. Commercial operators tend to run 700 to 1,000 hives per person, unless it is a family operation and several people put in part-time, unpaid labor. At some point, time is the most important factor, because your are big enough that you are already making money.

Dadant and Sons 2012 Catalog had a sketch of a small (up to 150 hives operation) setup. There are a lot of equipment options out there - Dadant, Maxant, Cowan, to name a few. 

*Write out a step-by-step process plan, and try to figure how much each step in the process would cost* at different levels. Then figure which operations you could do quickly be hand and which are really a whole lot better off done by machine. From this, you can figure a budget. Many people get stuck by not planning the whole process, then end up with mismatched equipment that was purchased at different times as their operation grew.

Some considerations are: How much filtration - bulk honey, "natural" honey, super clear show quality + settling tanks?; How much heat - 105 degrees F, 115 degrees F, or 130 degrees F (pump capacity and tube diameters can really speed up with the right amount of heat)?; How will I be cleaning up the mess?; Will this operation grow (especially # of people)?

Watch the movie, More Than Honey. It shows an automated operation with frame scrapers, de-boxing, uncapping, loading, extracting, unloading, etc. Go to a few different operations and look at their setups, quietly thinking, "where are the bottlenecks to workflow here?" and "where does the person go?"


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