How to Make Money Beekeeping

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

If you found this video helpful, please share on your favorite Facebook beekeeping group or with your beekeeping association! Thank you for your support!

[@bradydice238]

Thank you so much for this message. I’m a new beekeeper, in a week or so I will be getting my first colony. I’m a little nervous, however with the proper education I feel confident. In the near future I would like to sell honey and make some dough to earn back the cost of the hives. Your video was very inspiring!

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

Glad I could help! Your first couple years are the hardest. Keep at it. It gets easier and there's always money to me made selling your products from the hive.

[@RobinPoe]

Where I live in the Northwest, the biggest income is pollination services. Orchards, vineyards and berry patches are a major contributor to our economy. Even the hobbyist beekeepers get a good price for their hives, especially if the commercial services have colony collapse. The orchardist are usually begging for hives during the blossom season. The pollination services are so lucrative, that the honey is just a sideline. Also, Catholic Churches must have candles made of beeswax. You can sell candles to your local church. As a bonus, the priest will even come out and bless your beehives on St. Ambrose Day.

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

Thank you for the information!

[@ThatGardener]

You know I have never done been keeping but grow tons of flowers and pollination plants but watching your videos has encouraged me to do this one day if I can afford some more land. Thank you for your videos.

[@noahriding5780]

I would think there would be some insights from the gardening also. There's some cross skills there. I think some agriculture skills do help others, that you wouldn't expect. Although the degree of application may vary. At the very least there's +discipline etc.

[@guamlegalmovement6713]

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience. I am beginning my beekeeping journey with one hive from Mann Lake. What company did you make candle molds with? 11:07 What issues do most beekeepers suffer from in Hawaii? On Guam, the mites are not a major problem as of now. How much is 5 gallons or 55 gallons of honey in your market?

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

You're welcome! I made my own candle molds. The molds I worked with at my former job were from Mann Lake, but here in a tropical environment, those rubber molds cracked and fell apart within a few years. Whatever mold you get, I highly recommend silicone, plastic or something that won't break down in your climate. In Hawaii, the mites and small hive beetle are very bad. With no frost and a great soil and environment for beetles to thrive, it's very bad. The farm I used to work for sold a 5 gallon bucket of wild flower honey for $250. The blossom specific honeys, especially kiawe honey (also called mesquite) goes for a lot more.

[@guamlegalmovement6713]

@@BeekeepingMadeSimple Thank you for your response.

[@JasbirSingh-ur4ps]

Please gave information regarding direct selling from farm

[@joshuathehivekeeperchannel1896]

Thanks for the info... I think Hawaii is conducive environment for raising bees. Watching from Australia...

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

You're welcome! Hawaii, like everywhere, has things that make beekeeping difficult and easy. Because we have no frost, the varroa mite and small hive beetle population is incredibly high and being on an island, our genetic diversity is pretty low. However, we can keep bees and breed queens year round.

[@joshuathehivekeeperchannel1896]

@@BeekeepingMadeSimple I remember when I still worked in Minnesota as Beekeeper, my employer usually bought thousands of queens in Hawaii.

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

@@joshuathehivekeeperchannel1896 It's hard for hobby beekeepers to buy queens here because if you have a small order, most places don't want to bother selling to you. They're mostly filling orders for thousands of queens for the mainland and Canada. I did queen breeding for both apiaries I worked for and wasn't a huge fan of the process. It's a big business here in Hawaii, especially where I'm at in Kona because of the little wind and moderate climate.

[@noahriding5780]

You mentioned its hard to regain a wholesale account once lost... So how does that work when you have a lower crop year (but there's still a crop)? How do you manage that without losing the account, if its lower than normal? It would seem like at some point this would happen to every body through various means. In other agriculture forms it isn't unusual to have a bad year every once in awhile. Like in our family there was a story of one year an uncle a long time ago had just cut his alfalfa field and was about to go bale it and then a strong wind picked up and he literally lost the whole field. This was an amazing video. It really showed how big the market is.

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

What I've done in the past was have a back-up supplier. If I ran out of beeswax, there was a farm I could buy 30lb blocks of wax from and I also purchased 5 gallon buckets of liquid honey when I ran out. When it came to the specialized items like the comb and the kiawe, that was a limited supply and we sold it until we ran out. There's not a lot of people who sell comb honey here, so I believe people understood the limited supply and were happy when we were in stock. For the resort and chefs we sold honeycomb to, if I told them I didn't have anymore, they would have gone elsewhere immediately and would not have taken "sorry we're out" well. They pay a premium price and expect excellent service every time. I had to drop the resort as a client because I got tired of how demanding they were. It was too much for me. If you do have a client who orders from you monthly, I would keep some extra honey in stock just for them and tell other customers you don't here from often that you're out of stock. And if you run out then there's not a ton you can do about it other than give them a heads up you're running out as soon as possible and contact them as soon as you have more in stock.

[@justbee7278]

Great video 👍

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

Thanks 👍

[@Swarmstead]

I try to do as many of these things as possible.

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

Wow! Don't forget to take a day off. You'd make a killing doing swarm removals in my next of the woods. No one wants to do them and there are a ton of queen breeding operations whose hives swarm.

[@Swarmstead]

@@BeekeepingMadeSimple so heaven DOES exist? And in Hawaii on top of that?

[@BeekeepingMadeSimple]

@@Swarmstead LOL I hate cutouts, but yes. Kona, HI is where Kona Queens and Big Island Queens (owned by the Oliverez family) are. They're some of the biggest queen breeders in the U.S. and probably the world. A lot of small queen co have popped up over the years too. It's hard to find somewhere to put bees where they'll bring in much honey, but there's a lot of swarm removals and cutouts. I knew only one guy who was willing to do them and he was a woodworker so I knew he wasn't going to make a big mess in someone's house and he moved out of state last year.

[@Swarmstead]

@@BeekeepingMadeSimple I love doing cutouts, but just the easy ones. Once a ladder gets involved, I call my carpenter buddies.

[@ericgauthier8695]

BOIET 😂