How to Make Money from Bees – Real Ways Beekeepers Earn Income Part 1
Laurence Edwards outlines how beekeepers turn their operation into profit. Get VAT-registered early for tax reclaims on honey and queens. Diversify into wax, propolis, candles, and selling nucs and queens, which have high margins. Join the Bee Farmers Association for insurance, bulk discounts, and pollination contracts.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to be talking about how to make money from beekeeping. So we're going to split this video up into 2 parts. We're going to talk about kind of all the strategies that I've got for making money from beekeeping, and we'll talk you through each one of those individually. So the first thing to say, and the first item on my list, is if you are serious about making making money from beekeeping, and when I say making money, I mean kind of actually making a business out of it as opposed to kind of just a hobby, then my first recommendation would be to come to become VAT registered. Now that seems like potentially a strange way to start off this video, and it means jumping right in with kind of 2 feet right into the deep end of becoming VAT registered, but it pays huge dividends in terms of beekeeping in general. So the legal requirement for becoming VAT registered is if you earn over £85,000 £5,000 a year turnover, then you legally have to become VAT registered. But you can actually volunteer to become registered no matter how much your turnover is, as long as you have a genuine business and your aim of that business is to make a profit. And that's quite a critical point to kind of highlight, then you can become VAT registered. So what that does mean is that if it's just your hobby and you're looking at it as a kind of way to potentially offset taxes, then this isn't for you. You need to be a fully compliant, legitimate business with the ambition of making a regular profit, and then you can become VAT registered. So the benefits of becoming VAT registered specifically for beekeeping are around the fact that you can claim back VAT on pretty much every single purchase that you make. Beekeeping requires a lot of capital expenditure to get going in the beginning. There is a huge amount of equipment to buy, there's a huge amount of kind of extraction machinery to buy, premises, all of these things, barring premises there, you can kind of reclaim the VAT back on. So you need to seek expert advice from your accountant, but predominantly the majority of things that you buy, you can claim the VAT back on. So for example, if you buy something for £10,000, you can claim 20% back, so you get £2,000 back instantly on that. Now normally the way VAT works is that you— everything you buy, you receive a rebate on the VAT that you paid for it, and then everything that you sell, you charge VAT on, and then you need to give that back to HMRC. So in most cases, it generally balances itself out. Beekeeping is very different, and a number of other food businesses are like this in that the products that beekeepers sell are zero-rated for VAT. So you're still required to supply an invoice, you're still required to charge VAT, but the rate of VAT that you charge is 0%. So it's a zero-rated VAT item. Now that includes honey, with a couple of exceptions for honey in like plastic jars, squeezy bottles. But the majority of honey that you sell is zero-rated, and the majority— and all nucleus colonies, so any livestock or queens that you sell are zero-rated as well. So it's pretty much one way when it comes to VAT. And that's just the way it is. So there's nothing kind of dodgy or illegal going on. It's fully above board and checked out with accountants. So first recommendation is to become VAT registered. It's something to do early on in your business because although you can go back, I think, 3 or 4 years and claim the VAT back, if you do it early on, you get into that habit of keeping good records, and then you know that all of your invoices are there. I think if you were to say kind of 3 or 4 years after starting your business or after starting kind of beekeeping, and then trying to look back, you'd be scrambling around for these invoices and you probably couldn't find them all. So number 1, VAT registered. So number 2 is professional branding. So if you're serious about making a success of your business and you want to sell honey and you want to sell nucleus colonies, but in particular the honey element, and you want to become something more than just selling it kind of from your door, then you need professional branding. Now that's not to say that professional branding comes above kind of any of the other things like food legislation and hygiene ratings. I'm just picking these out in, in no relevant order whatsoever, but professional branding will set you apart from all of the hobbyist beekeepers. So hobby beekeepers, and we'll touch on this later on, maybe undervalue their honey product somewhat and sell it for quite cheaply. So in order to make a good profit where you're selling your honey at a slightly inflated price, you need to differentiate yourself from a hobby beekeeper, and you can do that by professional branding, professional fully compliant labels. So, and that's not to say you need to go and spend kind of £10,000-£15,000 on a professional graphic designer. Like, they're very reasonable these days, and you can kind of get people to do what is deemed to be quite professional branding for a reasonable rate indeed. So shop around, but I would suggest, I mean, kind of fixing a logo early on, getting some professional branding advice, and then being consistent across all of your kind of platforms. So the next one is social media. In this day and age, I found social media has been a huge, huge help to me in terms of getting my name out there and kind of reaching people that you wouldn't necessarily be able to reach otherwise. So I run 4 different social media platforms, including YouTube, which I kind of see as a version of social media. So I have Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and then I have my website on top of that. I make sure that I run all 4 of them and give them kind of equal attention I post pictures on Instagram with the kind of text that I want, and then that allows me to kind of send that over to Facebook as well. So it duplicates the posts quite easily, and then I just manually duplicate that over to Twitter as well. So it doesn't take me much longer to run all 3, but I kind of— I find that you get different groups of people on different social media platforms, so it's good to have all 3. And I find that the different social media platforms as well have slightly different kind of aims and objectives. So I sell the majority of my honey through Facebook, through my I have people kind of contacting me through there, but Twitter and Instagram will be more kind of stockists coming to me and saying, we're interested in stocking your honey, we've seen what you've done on Instagram or Twitter, and we like your values and stuff. So different objectives and aims for each one, but I run all 3 of them pretty much simultaneously with very similar posts on each. So the next one is, what's your USP, your unique selling point? So I've kind of got a few of these, but I think you need to have a USP if you're going to kind of compete in quite a congested market. So you can have a think about it. It can be pretty much anything. Our USP is that we strive towards zero-carbon beekeeping, and I know a number of other beekeepers do that, so it's not the most unique selling point, but it is a selling point, and it does differentiate you from kind of local other competitors, and it differentiates you from hobby beekeepers. So it doesn't need to be unique, it just needs to be kind of as unique as you can possibly get it. Other things that we do is that we, we try and eliminate all single-use plastics from our kind of processes, so all of our packaging doesn't have a single item of plastic in there. And the final thing we do is we try and improve kind of pollinator habitats across North Wales. So at the moment we're giving away one pack of free wildflower seeds with every single jar of honey, with the aim that people will kind of go out and plant these in wild spaces that aren't really tended to, to increase kind of pollinator habitats across North Wales. So again, other people are probably doing that, but that's just something that we've come up with to try and help boost sales but also to kind of give something back to the environment. So the The next thing, kind of talk about honey. So you need to offer a diverse range of honey products. And now that doesn't mean that you need to kind of offer every single flavor of honey under the sun, so add in different kind of flavorings and niche products to it. But I think you need to try and expand it into some of the kind of core markets for honey. So instead of just selling runny honey, you ideally need to be doing as a minimum kind of runny honey, soft-set honey, maybe a specialist kind of like a heather honey or a borage or an oilseed rape, something like a kind of single origin. Origin honey, and then potentially a cupcomb product as well. That's something really, really different and kind of opens up different avenues in terms of markets. And then the sky's kind of the limit in terms of the other things that you can do. So I know people do like cinnamon-flavoured honey, people do like a Christmas-flavoured honey. You can do all of these different products, but just be aware that the lifespan of these products may be a little bit reduced by adding things into them. There's additional requirements in terms of labelling and packaging and stuff, so you need to keep, you need to keep mind the kind of difficulty of producing a wide range of products and managing that stock compared to kind of keeping it relatively simple with the 4 or 5 key products. But I guess if you want to make money, you need to kind of need to find that happy medium between having a nice diverse range and not pushing it too far whilst keeping things nice and simple. So like I say, I think a good starter for 10 is a runny honey, a soft-set honey, a single-origin honey, so either a heather, an oilseed rape, or borage or something like that, and then a cup comb product. And that gives you kind of like a nice range of honey products to sell. So the next one then, after the kind of suitable honey products, you want to talk about the pricing for honey. And I think a lot of new beekeepers do get caught out in terms of the pricing for honey, and you just need to understand that it is an incredibly valuable product. What you don't want to do is you do not want to start off pricing it really, really low because you'll find that you'll just sell out really quickly. And then the problem if you sell out really quickly is you can't give that continuity of supply, and that is what you need in order to kind of break into these shops, but also to remain in the shops. The worst thing to happen is that you kind of, you get like a nice garden center or something approach you and say that they want you to supply some honey, and then you supply them, I don't know, 50 jars, 100 jars, and then they get through it all and they come back for more next month and you've run out. Because you know exactly what's going to happen is they're just going to go to another beekeeper who gets their foot in the door, and then you're not invited back. to supply that stockist anymore. So you kind of only really get one chance with each stockist, and you need to make sure that you've got enough honey to kind of keep that demand going. And the way to do that is to make sure that you don't sell it too cheaply. It's, it's a real pet hate of mine when you see kind of people selling a pound of honey for like £4, because I know how much work they've put in to get that honey to that level, and they're underselling themselves. And obviously it makes my honey seem more expensive. So there's that element to it as well. But just kind of from their point of view, why not sell it for £7? Because they'd still sell all of their honey and they'd make a little bit more money out of it, quite a lot more money out of it. So the key message is don't undersell your honey. Find a reasonable price, do some market research, see what else is selling in the area, and don't undercut people. There is enough market share for pretty much everyone to kind of get in there. In the UK, we only supply like 10% of the market. So it's just about educating people that honey is a really kind of valuable commodity and don't underprice yourself. So then apart from honey, you've got all of the other products that you can sell from your hive. So you really don't, don't want to not take into account kind of wax, propolis, royal jelly. And I get that royal jelly is a bit of a specialist one and it's not something that I supply, but wax and propolis is really, really easy to collect. And if you kind of keep in the back of your mind that you, you're selling your wax as a commodity, it makes it a lot easier to kind of collect electro throughout the year. So at the moment there is a huge, huge demand for local kind of good quality beeswax for people making beeswax wraps and people making special potions for their beards and all that kind of stuff. So I'll go on to this further in the video. You can branch out into these areas or you can just sell kind of directly to the people who make these products. But yeah, don't think about it as I'm just gonna sell honey. You need to look at all these other products as well. So you're looking at wax, propolis, and if you want, royal jelly as well. So kind all of the other products that are available from that hive of bees, which are essentially byproducts to the honey production. But you don't treat them as byproducts. You can treat them as a precious commodity and market it that way. So, yeah, so the next one, kind of just expanding on the previous point, is taking those products further. So you harvest your wax and you harvest your propolis and all of these things, and then you can sell it directly to kind of suppliers and people who make these products, or you can branch out and start making them yourselves. So there's absolutely tons of different things that you can make with beeswax. So you can do candles, candles, you can do lip balms, you can do creams, you can do beeswax wraps. Like, a lot of people just make businesses just from selling, um, products that they create from hive byproducts. So I guess what I'm getting at is that in order to kind of make money through beekeeping, you need to have your— you need to have your eyes open to all of the possible market opportunities. I don't think many small to mid-scale beekeepers— and I mean, I'm very much— I'm borderline hobbyist, I'd say. I mean, I'm kind of the lowest of the low when it comes to professional beekeepers. If I just relied on honey, I wouldn't— I don't think I'd even break even. It's about kind of expanding into all of those small markets and exploiting them as best as you possibly can. So that's what I'm getting at. You just need to be kind of— have your eyes open to it, have as diverse a range of products as you possibly can, and if possible, create those products yourself. So if you're doing any lip balms or creams or anything, you need accreditation for them. The accreditation isn't actually that expensive when you come to think about it. I I think it's a couple of hundred quid per product. So if you did like 3 or 4 of those, I think it would be a really, really good investment. And then you can kind of sell them at the markets and it's nice to go in other products that you're going to sell. So the next one that further expands on the diversity of the items that you're selling is kind of stuff above and beyond what you're getting out of the hive. So if you just want to make as much money as you possibly can, these are the areas you need to look at. So for example, adopting a hive, Companies will pay rather handsomely to adopt one of your hives and to have a nice plaque on it, and for you to give them like a few jars of honey and some pictures of the hive in return, and tweet about it and give them some kind of social media coverage. Companies love that, and companies have budgets to spend on that kind of thing, so you can look into that. Gift boxes. I find gift boxes do really, really well kind of at the different holiday seasons. So over Christmas particularly, but Mother's Day and people's birthdays and all of these other times, gift boxes work really, really nicely. And if you can package them up, And keep your brand aligned with the gift box, that works really well. We do a gift box at the moment. It's kind of a soft-set honey, a runny honey, a beeswax wrap, a little mini dipper, and then we put that in a cardboard box and it's branded up all nicely. And then the USP for that box is it's 100% plastic-free. So there's not a single item of plastic anywhere in that box or the packaging. We just use kind of recycled shredded paper as a packing ingredient. Forgot to mention, we also have the wildflower seeds in there as well. So it's a real kind of like nice sustainable product for people to buy. And the feedback we've had from that is, yeah, we love the honey, but we love the kind of the branding and the values that are surrounding the product as well. So if you can kind of get all of that into the products, it works. It works really, really well. Right, so we move on to equipment then, and there's no getting away from it when you're thinking about starting beekeeping. There is a huge amount of equipment to buy. There really is. And it It does kind of seem like a bit of an uphill battle at times in that you think you've got everything you need and then you don't, and then something else comes along. So my advice is that you just need to forward plan a little bit for kind of what you think you're going to need within your beekeeping ventures, and you need to try and scale that up appropriately at the early stage within your business. So what I mean by that is if it's a serious business venture and you're kind of looking to turn it into a business, you just need to future-proof stuff. So don't buy a 12-frame extractor. Buy a 30-frame extractor. Buy something that's going to be able to kind of be used for a lot longer than maybe like 1 or 2 years before you have to upgrade it. It's really, really not a good philosophy to say, well, I'll buy that for now and it will tide me over for the next couple of years, because it's probably not going to be used the following year, and then you're going to have lost the money on it. It's going to depreciate. And then the issue that you have is that when you come to sell stuff, you get all the benefits from being VAT registered, but when you come to sell your items, it's a nightmare. You have to charge VAT on them. And then it's quite painful. And I know that sounds really silly because you're getting all of that back from all the equipment anyway, so it makes no difference. But it just kind of plays on my mind a little bit that I don't want to buy equipment and then have to kind of sell it again at a later date because it feels like I'm not getting good value for money that way. So the other thing to say with forward planning equipment is you need to kind of understand that you're going to get good deals if you buy things in bulk. So I'm talking particularly kind of about like hives here. You just need to have a think about what your plan is for the future, because the difference between buying 10 hives and 100 hives is a significant saving and the ability to kind of haggle with the supplier. So you just need to sit down and kind of put together a bit of a business plan, work out how your cash flow is going to work, and if you can afford to kind of commit that much money to it at an early stage. But all I'm saying is that if you sit down and kind of think about this and plan it at an early stage, then it makes the kind of procurement of these key items a lot more— a lot easier. So the next one is Is make your own equipment. So where possible, do you know what I mean, I kind of buy everything in the sales and buy it for as cheap as I possibly can. But there's certain things that I just don't buy because it's a lot cheaper for me to make them. And you can, if you're scaling up a business to a significant size, these savings really do mount up. So one example of that is high floors. So, do you know what I mean, to buy a floor, you're talking kind of maybe £15 you're going to get a floor for if you're buying up to like 50, 60 at a time. I can make them for £2 or £3. So I always make whatever I can. And now that's not to say I, I started off making kind of roofs and brood boxes and all of that as well, and my woodworking skills aren't the best, so they didn't last that long. And when you factor in the time that it took me to do it as well, it wasn't the most cost-effective solution. So you need to look at what you can make quickly and what has the biggest impact on kind of saving money. But like I said before, the capital expenditure in beekeeping is huge, and if you want to make money, i.e., turn over a decent profit, you need to make Make sure that you limit your capital expenditure the best that you possibly can. And one way of doing that is to kind of make your own floors, make your own equipment where you're actually going to see a financial benefit from doing that. So you just need to look into it. So I said, I mean, the number one thing that I think that you can make yourself and save money on is floors. I know a lot of people do make brood boxes and supers, but I do think if you shop around in the sales for kind of seconds and thirds wooden or kind of cheap poly items when they're in the sales, then it's probably better off. Buying those new. So the next one is you need to buy jars and labels in bulk as best as you possibly can. I was quite amazed at the difference between buying, say, maybe 200 or 300 jars at a time and buying a pallet of jars. The cost comes down significantly and you make huge savings. So you just need to do this across the board, really. You need to be as efficient as you possibly can with, with your outgoings because the capital expenditure is so large. Every kind of opportunity that you have to save money and to buy in bulk, you need to take to that. So again, for example, the labels— I was buying labels maybe 200, 300 at a time and they were costing me 40 or 50p a label. And this is just when I was kind of starting out. Um, and now I buy them 10,000 at a time and they cost me about 4p a label. So I'm saving 90%, um, in terms of the cost of the labels. And when you scale that up over a long period, it's a significant saving. So you just need to make sure that you're buying in bulk for all of your jars, all of your labels, all of your tamper labels. And obviously they need to be kind of like coherent and consistently branded with your professional branding and make sure that the labels are fully compliant. Haggle with suppliers. So you can kind of see a theme here, which is cost reduction. And I think that really is the name of the game. Like, it's quite easy to get carried away and pay full price for everything, but when you're getting to a point where you're looking at it from a business point of view, you really do— sounds so simple, but you need to haggle with the suppliers. There's a lot of room for margin in a lot of these in a lot of the supply that comes in through beekeeping. And unless you ask the question, you're not going to get a positive answer. So I kind of always haggle with suppliers, and a lot of the time I get told, nope, the price is the price, especially if I'm trying to haggle on an already reduced or a sale item. And that's fair enough. I mean, the stockists are there, the suppliers are there to make a profit as well, and if they can't make a profit at the price you're demanding, then they will tell you that. They're not going to sell it to you at a loss, but you need to ask the question. Um, and then The way that you're going to be able to kind of achieve those savings is by buying in bulk. So give them kind of an offer, make it appealing to them. So don't go and buy 5 hives and say, can I have 20% off? Because they're likely going to tell you where to go. But if you want to buy 50 hives off them and you want 20% off, then I'd say that's a kind of realistic target to be looking at. And that changes kind of depending on the number that you're buying, the kind of type of product that you're buying. But don't forget that you're getting the cost VAT off that as well. So the savings kind of become more apparent. But you need to ask the question, speak to the suppliers, and do your best at haggling. Right, so the next one is kind of a move away from honey. So I said that you need to— if you're kind of like a small to medium-scale beekeeper, you need to make sure that you're selling as many products as you possibly can. So we touched on kind of honey products, different types of honey products, different hive products, so wax, propolis, royal jelly, and then kind of value-added products such as kind of creams and lip balms. But then The other biggest commodity that you've got available to you is your bees, and this is where kind of like quite a significant amount of my money actually comes from, which is selling queens, selling nucs. So there's a— and the queens, not so much. I mean, I sell a few queens, sell a few F1 queens, but not a huge amount, and sometimes have difficulty getting those mated anyway and kind of supplying at the numbers that I'd like to supply. But selling nucs, they're very, very easy to produce. And if you kind of keep some colonies set aside just for producing nucs from, so you can take like maybe one production colony, split it into 5, feed it up, and then you've got 5 good strong nucs to kind of sell the next year, you can easily make £1,000 by doing that. So I mean, the price for nucs is a very, very good price at the moment. You're talking around £200 is kind of like a good UK average for a national nuc spread over 6 frames, and the demand is very, very high. high, especially if you're willing to post these nucs. So the demand, local demand, will kind of vary with the areas. But if you're willing to post them, the market share can be quite substantial. So you need to look into that. You need to make sure that you're not only selling honey products, you're not only selling hive products, but you're also selling bees and queens at the same time. And then you can see kind of a real good return on your investment, because obviously with selling nucs, you don't need any of the extraction machinery that you would need with selling honey. So the actual return on the investment is basically you're just paying for some boxes, you're paying for your bees, and then feed and all the other kind of overheads that come with beekeeping anyway, but you get a good return on that. Not so much of a huge demand for this one up north where I am, but down south I know this is very, very kind of good business for, and that is pollination services. So the money varies depending on where you are in the country, and it varies on kind of the crop that you're going to look to go and pollinate. Some beekeepers don't like going and taking them to certain crops through damage to the bees, but predominantly the crops that you get in the UK are quite beneficial to bees anyway, and you can actually get a reasonable honey crop off most of them, if not all of them. So pollination services are a really, really good way of kind of increasing the value of the hives that you've got, especially if you can kind of secure good pollination contracts for items such as borage during places where where you're actually going to get a good honey crop as well as providing those pollination services. You can see this in the US, that's how they make their money in the US, you know what I mean? They package up their bees, they take them out to the almonds, they get a really, really good payday from it. They don't get any honey from it, but it doesn't matter, and then they've got big strong colonies that they sell off later on in the year. So although the cost of honey in the US, I'm led to believe, is relatively low, very low in fact, you can get really, really good pollination contracts out there, and then they sell their bees at the end of it quite cheap, and they seem to make a pretty good living doing that. So it's worth exploring it. Obviously, you need to be a member of the Bee Farmers if you're going to kind of get access to these pollination contracts, and I'll mention that later on in the video. So the next one isn't so much how you're going to make money, but it's kind of more preservation of business and making sure that you're 100% legal and compliant. Now, this is really, really important, and make sure you do this early on in your beekeeping venture, is do some research into what you need to do to become 100% legal and compliant sell in your area or in your country. So I can only obviously give advice for the UK market. I'm not sure of any of the legislation, and make sure that you do seek other professional advice. So this is just kind of my, my comments on the subject as opposed to giving you formal advice. But you need to make sure that you're registered as a business, you need to make sure that you're registered as a food business, you need to make sure that you've got a food hygiene rating, you need to make sure that you've got kind of appropriate hazard control methods in place, you need to make sure that your labels are fully 100% compliant and they have all of the information on them. You need to make sure that the products that you're selling are fully compliant so they don't have any additives in there, they don't have any sugar that's kind of contaminated the honey. There is a bit of a minefield and you need to kind of go away and make sure that you are compliant and you need to put in place processes to kind of avoid any issues arising further down the line. So it's a really, really important one. You're not going to make any money from being fully compliant, but You stand to lose everything if you're not fully compliant. So probably should have been number 1 in this list, but do your research and make sure that you've got adequate procedures and processes in place and that everything you sell is fully compliant in terms of the product and the labeling. So I mentioned it before, join the Bee Farmers Association. Now, there is quite strict acceptance criteria for the Beekeepers Association. It's not for hobbyists. I probably only just about made the cut, but you You need to have— I mean, you need to have— to join the Bee Farmers, you need to have an active, thriving business. It's not for people who've got 5 or 6 hives at the bottom of their garden and sell a bit of honey from their door. It needs to be like a fully fledged business that is operating with the aim of making a profit. I believe they're taking away the cap in terms of the actual number of colonies, but I understand it's still kind of a bit of an unwritten rule. You're talking 40 or 50 colonies, production colonies, in order to kind of be accepted for the Beekeepers. and then you need to prove to them that you're running a fully active business. So the benefits of joining the Bee Farmers is obviously you get professional recognition, you get really, really good public and product liability insurance, so the insurance packages are really, really good through the Bee Farmers. You get access to cheap equipment, and this is the reason why I say this early on, and it's the same with becoming VAT registered. It might seem like a real huge step at the beginning, and I'm not suggesting you come up with an idea to become a beekeeper and then the next day join the Beekeepers. You need to develop the business a little bit more than that, but you want to kind of aim to join it as soon as you possibly can, um, because you get access to all of these magnificent, magnificent benefits. And the big one is the, the cost savings that you get kind of through buying jars in bulk, buying products, um, pollination services. So you, you probably save— well, you will, you will save a huge amount of money, way more than the subscription fee, just by kind of joining up and getting these savings. Like, I was amazed at some of the kind of savings on jars and frames and, and large extraction equipment through joining the Bee Farmers. So it's just a Good tip. If you're serious about it, build this— build the company up to a reasonable size and then join the Bee Farmers Association. So the next one is you need to learn from others. There are so many really, really successful beekeepers out there, and they are— I mean, they're really, really good at what they do. So why try and reinvent the wheel when they've kind of already given you a really good template to follow? And that's not to say to rip anyone off, just to kind of try and copy exactly what they're doing, but don't make the same mistakes that they're making. And I'm a strong believer in that. I don't want people to make mistakes because I kind of feel passionately about the bees, so I'm quite happy to kind of air my mistakes for the whole world to see, or however many people want to watch my videos. But yeah, so the advice is take a look around, see what other people are doing, and learn from others. So that could be look what other people's branding's like. Do I want to have the same branding as a lot of other people who have a lot of hexagons and a lot of bees on their logos? Maybe not. Or do I think that actually that's what people kind of associate with beekeeping is hexagons and bees, so I do want to have that as my logo? And that's up for you to make that judgment call. And the same with kind of like the style of labels. So do you want to have a label that kind of differentiates yourself from the crowd, or do you want to have one that puts you kind of in that bracket with the, with the same people who have similar logos? Again, I'm not going to give you the advice on that. It's kind of up to you. But for me personally, I think it's nice to have a logo that kind of stands out a little bit from something a little bit different. But that's not to say that I didn't kind of look at other people's logos, look at other people's labels, and think, what, what works well? How do I want to position myself and position my business? So that's not just a thing to do at the beginning. I constantly do that, and I think other people do that. I think that's kind of the way of the world, is that you look around, you see what other people are doing, you look at what's successful, and then you try and replicate that success as best as you can without copying it. So I touched on it just a little bit There, saying assess the market, and that's a really crucial, crucial point, is that you need to assess the market. You could be in a place where the value of jarred honey products is very small, or there's a limited market for it, but there might actually be a real significant demand for bulk honey, maybe 100 miles away. So don't go through the kind of all of the aggravation and the quite nasty process of having to jar up all your honey all the time. If you're not going to earn a good amount of money for it, or you might just earn slightly less selling it in big bulk £60 buckets. It's about what's doing what's best for your business. So you need to kind of assess that market, see where you're going to position yourself, and just try and— again, just try and learn from others. So conversely, you may be in a position where you're not going to get any money for your bulk honey because there's loads on the market, but you think that you can demand a really high price for jars of honey. And in that instance, you might not even want to keep bees. You might just keep a few bees, and then you might buy kind of honey in from local beekeepers, do quality assurance checks on that honey, and then you just become like a packer. And that's a really good kind of market opportunity anywhere in this joint. There's loads of people that do that. They just buy really good premium quality honey from local beekeepers, they package it up, put nice labels on it, and then they sell it out to the public. And then that serves a lot of people well because a lot of the beekeepers don't want to be kind of don't want to have the hassle of putting all the honey into jars, they just want to sell it in big bulk buckets, or if you're kind of mega scale, sell it in big 200-litre drums and let someone else do all of that. So you need to assess the market and position yourself where you think is appropriate. So I think that's it for part 1 of this video. It's quite a lot to digest there. I've probably got a similar amount of tips and guidance to come in the second part of the video. We'll we'll we'll put them out together, so I'll make sure that both of the videos are there. So I'm not kind of leaving you hanging for the rest of the advice because there's probably loads that I've missed out that you think that I've missed out. So we'll call it a day there, and please tune in for the next part of the video. So thanks for watching, and I'll speak to you soon.
