How Much Do Bees Cost - How Much To Start Beekeeping - Is Beekeeping Expensive #bees #business

Is beekeeping expensive? Today I'm going to give you the breakdown and tell you what I think. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Looking at the price of nucs, the price of queens, the price of frames, foundation, beehives, protective suits, smokers, hive tools, extraction equipment, settling tanks, jars, The numbers really, really quickly stack up when it comes to beekeeping. It is an expensive hobby, there is no getting away from that. Is beekeeping expensive? Yes, it's definitely an expensive hobby, but there's a little bit more to it than that, and that's what I'm going to discuss in this video. So when I take a look around now and I see the prices of nucs, and our nucs definitely aren't cheap, I see the prices of queens and all of the other stuff that I mentioned there in the intro, it's very, very expensive. And not only is it expensive, but the price is getting higher and higher and higher each year, especially in the UK. We're at the mercy in the UK of a Brexit tax. Unfortunately, that's what it is. Everything seems to be getting more and more expensive, from polyhives to wooden hives where there's a worldwide timber shortage, to all of the other stuff that I've spoken about already. However, there's a little bit more to it than that, so you do need a good chunk of money to get started in beekeeping. And if you want me to put a figure on that, I think you're talking around £1,000. It's a lot of money to get started in beekeeping. And what I would include in that is a nuc, so say £300 for a nuc, and then you need a beehive, you're talking around £150 for a beehive, and then all of the frames that go inside the beehive, and then your protective equipment, so your gloves, your bee suit if you're going to get a good quality bee suit, your smoker tool. Depending on what you buy and depending on how you set yourself up, you're probably talking in the region, let's say, of £500 to £1,000 in the UK. And then it gets worse than that as well, because if you want to go down the route of extracting your honey, you want to go down the route of expanding it to 2 hives, to 5 hives, to 10 hives, the costs mount up so, so quickly. They really do. But this is very, very different to any other hobby. So if you were going to go and start playing golf, you'd probably pay about £1,000 as well. You pay your golf membership fees, You might go and get some trousers, a nice little polo shirt, some shoes, your golf clubs. Say you spend £1,000 on all of that, and then the next year you think, all right, I'm going to upgrade my golf set and I'm going to get even better clubs, I'm going to get a bigger driver. You might sell the other one, you might make 50% of the cost back. And then 2 years later you think, you know what, I'm rubbish at golf, which I am, I'm rubbish at golf, but I do enjoy playing golf. You sell all of your gear and you make a 50 or 60% loss because you're selling it secondhand. Beekeeping is very different in terms of a hobby because it actually generates quite a decent amount of money depending on how you want to go with it, depending if you want to keep the numbers static or you want to keep on expanding. But if you buy a couple of hives, couple of nucs, all of the equipment to get going, you soon begin to actually turn out a decent amount of money. And I remember, I'll give him a name drop here, one of the channel members, Rob Tallis, sent me a picture of this hive here And it was 7 supers tall. So he bought an Abelo 12-frame poly hive, bought a nuc off us early in the season, middle of April. Come August, he had it on double brood. And correct me if I'm wrong, Rob, in the comments, but he had 7 supers that were full on a single hive. I think it was in the region of 150, 160, and again, correct me if I'm wrong in the comments, 12-ounce jars. Now, if you say a 12-ounce jar of honey, never undersell your honey. You could definitely sell that for £9 or £10. If you've got 150 jars and you put them out and find a retail outlet for that, you're talking in the region of £1,000 to £1,500 in your first year in honey sales. Now please don't think everybody who buys a beehive in their first year is going to get that much honey, is going to get that sort of rate of expansion, is going to be able to sell all of that honey. But the potential is definitely there. And what I know Rob didn't do last year, which I know Rob is going to do this year— this is all about you, this video, Rob, I hope you're enjoying it— he's going to make up some nucs. And this is where you can quickly cancel out the spend, the initial capital expenditure of putting that into beehives, buying the bees, buying the frames, buying the equipment, extraction equipment, beehives, everything that you originally buy. Because once you get that colony through the year, you can easily turn that colony into 2. You can make that split, and there's nothing to say that you're not going to get the same amount of honey from both of those 2 splits if you make that early on in the year. Rob got that nuc in the middle of April, 6-frame nuc. So if you take a full-size colony in the middle of April, which is what most size colonies will be come the middle of April if they've expanded and got through winter properly, and you add a mated queen, and they're slowly becoming available at that point of the year, you've got 2 nucs. So you can get that exact same buildup, And then you've got 2, and then the following year you can do 4 and 8, and even more than that. You can say, right, I'm not going to get any honey this year, I'm going to build up a colony. And this is a video that you do not want to miss next year, so if you're new to the channel, definitely hit that subscribe button because this is going to be the best series ever. But I'm going to take a colony like this, a single National Deep colony, and I'm going to show you how many splits you can make out of it in a single year. One year, one colony, I'm going to have unlimited access to mated queens, and I'm targeting 40 nucs from a single colony. Now that's not normal, definitely don't use your bee math and work out how much money you can make on that. I'd say on average though, you can definitely take a single colony and split it into between 4 to 6 nucs without taking any honey off each year. Now if you say the average cost of a nuc, and different people sell their nucs for different amounts of money, mine cost £300 because they're good nucs, But if you take 6 nucs from a single colony, the one colony that you bought that you spent £1,000 on, you send it for £300 each, even if you say let's sell it for £250 each, that's £1,500 that you've got just from selling nucs from that one colony. And if you do that over a couple of years, you've still got a couple of beehives to go. So going back to the original question, is beekeeping expensive? Yes, it definitely is an expensive hobby. It's expensive to start, it's expensive to grow, but depending on what you want to do with it, when you get to a point that you plateau, the number of hives that you've got can actually turn over a reasonable amount of money and you can start making a really good profit on it. Now I know Gregory Pat as well, he's not a channel member, but he follows all these videos and is really active on the No Nonsense Beekeeping Facebook page, which you should definitely check out if you enjoy talking about bees. But he's going through this process at the moment and he's in the process that's a bit painful, Which is spending the money. No doubt about it, it is expensive when you want to take that jump up to producing a lot of honey, jarring a lot of honey. There's lots of steps that you need to jump through. He's turned his garage, or part of his garage, into a food-grade hygienic extraction room and jarring room and had the local environment team round. They've given him a food hygiene rating. All of that costs a lot of money. But once you get to that point, you've spent all of your money, you've got lots of colonies, they can grow and grow and grow. They can give you a really, really good income. So I just wanted to do that video because I see a lot of people look at the cost of nucs, the cost of beekeeping equipment, and I just think so long as the nucs are still available to sell at that price, and so long as you can still get a decent price for your honey— and I really see a movement and a trend in people wanting good quality honey, a move away from the cheap supermarket honey where it's 60p a pound Nobody wants to spread that on their toast. There's actually quite good money in it, and I would just take that into your consideration when you're starting off. There is money to be made, but you need to do it slowly. Don't get figures into your head thinking you're going to become a millionaire in a few years. Definitely not that much money to be made. But if you want to do it in a sustainable way, put in place a little bit of a business plan. How many hives you're going to start off with, how much you're going to spend, how you're going to split those colonies, the years where you're going to focus on expansion, making up nucs for sale, the years where you're going to focus on honey production, targeting those honey outlets as well. If you do all of that, you'll find that you reach a point quite soon, if you plateau your colonies, where you'll actually break even. And then once you've broken even, you can make a really good amount of honey selling nucs, selling queens, selling honey, selling all of the beehive products as well— royal jelly, propolis, pollen, beeswax. There's lots that you can sell in a beehive, and there is a huge demand for that in the UK. Now I'm going to move this on a little bit to the other end of the spectrum, because I've spoken there about the high end, I would say, of the spectrum in terms of is beekeeping expensive. Yes, it's very expensive. You can buy a really nice expensive poly hive from Abelo, which is definitely the best poly hive on the UK market, and a £300 nuc from me. So obviously that's going to be expensive as well. But you can go the other direction as well, and I really like it when I see people doing this, and I have great admiration when people do this, which is, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to make my own hives from some cheap wood that I've got left over, and I'm going to catch a swarm, and I'm just going to keep on expanding that swarm, and I'm going to keep on expanding my hives by making them at home. Beekeeping on a shoestring is definitely an idea for a series, I think, because it's good fun and I enjoy doing that stuff. I don't have a huge amount of time for it as well, but beekeeping doesn't have to be expensive. And I reckon a lot of people have got to the point in this video— congratulations if you got this far in the video, by the way— And they're thinking, hang on, beekeeping's not expensive at all. I've done this, this, and this, and it's really, really cheap, and I don't spend anything. And I know a few people like that, and like I said, I've got great admiration for them. I think it's really good, really thrifty. I'm so tight, I'm so thrifty when it comes to everything else except beekeeping. And I love seeing that people, they'll go out, they'll catch swarms, they'll make their own hives, they go foundationless, and they use a foundationless system because they prefer it, because they're not using any foreign wax that's imported. Obviously it's a lot cheaper as well. They'll make their splits, they sell their nucs, they will get to the point where they're turning over a profit way, way earlier than investing in all of the fancy equipment, the nicer stuff. So beekeeping doesn't have to be an expensive hobby, depends which way you want to go. Catching swarms is so easy. I've done tons of videos on this. Going out and catching them can be a little bit competitive. A lot easier is putting up bait hives. Put up bait hives in the right location, put 10 up, I'd be very surprised if you didn't get 3 swarms. You take those 3 swarms and you get good genetics, that's the important thing, you need to get a bit lucky getting some good genetics. Your bees might be a little bit more feisty, they might get through the cheaper beekeeping suit that you've worn because you didn't want to spend money on it, but there's no reason it has to be an expensive hobby. And I see various people, some on YouTube, some on beekeeping forums, some on Facebook groups, that do beekeeping on a shoestring, on a budget, They do it really, really well, and I do have a lot of admiration for them. So going back to my original question again, is beekeeping expensive? Generally, yes, it's very expensive, but if you want to do it on a budget, you definitely can, and I reckon most people will end up somewhere in the middle. So that was me rambling on for probably a little bit too long about is beekeeping expensive, but I just wanted to give you that take on that because I do think a lot of people look at it and say, I want to keep bees, and then they look at the cost and they think, Wow, beekeeping is so expensive! And I wanted to reassure those people that it is expensive to start off with, but you definitely can get to a point where you start to recoup those costs, break even, hopefully turn a profit. And there's other ways of doing it as well. I want beekeeping to be as inclusive as it possibly can be for everyone because I love beekeeping. Like, I'm so passionate about it. I think it's such good fun, and for me, it's a perfect opportunity to get away from the stresses of my life, Come out into the open countryside or wherever you're keeping your bees, just spend some mindful time on the bees. And I don't want people to think you need £1,000 to be able to do that. So all of those people, go out, have a go at making a hive yourself, see if you can get some cheap components from a skip. Always good going skip diving. Put together your beehive, mind the bee space because you will always build it wrong, probably have to adjust it a little bit. Get a bait hive set up, Follow one of the videos, the tutorials we've got. Catch yourself some bees, and then that way you get a bit of a free go to see if beekeeping's for you before you spend all of that money. So I hope you enjoyed that video. Thanks for watching this one. Stick it in the comments below. Do you think beekeeping's expensive? Yes or no? Feel free to tell me how much money you've spent as well. I like hearing how much money people have spent on bees because it makes me feel a little bit better that I've not spent so much money over the years on it as well. But as always, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. I'm gonna see you next time. Bye.