Beekeeping Income Sources And Budgets

 Beekeeping Income Sources

Depending on the part of the country and other environmental factors, a typical colony of bees can produce 80 to 120 pounds of surplus (harvestable) honey and 10 to 18 pounds of pollen in an average year (Deeby, 2002d). Besides selling honey and other bee products such as beeswax, pollen, royal jelly, propolis, bee venom, or queens beekeepers can also provide pollination services (hive rentals) to farmers and orchardists (ERS/NASS, no date).

In 1999, commercial beekeepers in the Pacific Northwest averaging about 2,000 hives each were charging from $20 to $40 per hive for pollination services, depending on the crop. In addition, they were transporting and renting these hives about three different times during the year to different parts of the country. Those rentals provided roughly 65% of the commercial beekeepers  incomes (Burgett, 1999). On a more modest scale, keeping just a few hives can generate some income, especially with creative retailing of honey, honeycomb, wax, and pollen. In addition, a bee colony can provide valuable pollination on the producers own farm. Small-scale beekeepers often ask how they should determine a price for their

honey. Prices around the country vary. In June 2002, the USDA/Agricultural Marketing Service/ National Honey Report listed prices for honey ranging from $0.83 per pound in Florida to $1.00 per pound in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Montana (USDA/AMS, 2002) (See Further Resources: Periodicals on how to obtain these monthly reports). However, these reports reflect the price of honey that is being produced by large-scale beekeepers and do not indicate what small beekeepers should charge for their honey (Wenning, 1999). The best sources of local price information will probably be other local beekeepers. And some consumers are willing to pay more for value added  products such as flavored honeys, honey wine, honey beer (mead), and packaged honey gifts than for plain honey.

Budgets 

The Pennsylvania State University Cooperative Extension Agriculture Alternatives publication Beekeeping (enclosed) contains an annual beekeeping budget that summarizes the receipts, costs, and net returns for 10 mature bee colonies. The publication notes that ìsuccessful side-line operations typically maintain 50 to 500 colonies.î It also states that ìThere will be no receipts from an operation until the second yearî (Frazier et al., 1998). The sample Excel budget is available at . Several detailed commercial beekeeping budgets for honey and pollination operations are available in the Alberta Agriculture, Food, and Rural Development Ministry publication

 cial Honey Industry. It should be remembered that dollar amounts are stated in Canadian dollars (about 64 cents to the U.S. dollar at the time of this writing). The publication can be viewed at . These budgets were designed as aids for evaluating a beekeeping enterprise. The sample budget presents a workable combination of inputs that will produce a given output. This combination of inputs probably does not represent any given beekeeping operation, and the actual costs of inputs are likely different for each operation. While there may be hundreds of combinations of variable and fixed costs, as well as income potentials, each budget gives only one combination. Different production and management practices, as well as various marketing opportunities, can make the beekeepers actual budget quite different from these budgets.