Thanks for the insights, I appreciate the candor. I started off as a kid with my dad in the 70’s. He only kept 4-8 hives but leveraged them for a bit of cash flow through education. He was an environmental educator and we lived on a nature center in Ohio so it was a good niche. I went off to the army and other government agencies through the 80’s, 90’s, and early this century before buying a farm and settling down to teach. I’ve been in the hobby again since 2006, minus time for a couple of deployments with the MI National Guard. Learning to deal with mites was my biggest curve.
The model I’m playing with has little cash flow from honey, wax, and propolis and none from pollen. I budgeted for 25lbs of honey per super and 3% wax by weight of honey harvested. My main profit centers I’m hoping for will come from polination services, nuc sales, and education/consultation.
I live in blueberry, and fruit orchard country and while polination sales are in the dumps right now, I am expecting them to improve. I am budgeting $63 per hive for that. Nucs sell as fast as they come availabe in Michigan and net over $100 each. That would be my main opportunity. Consultation is just an idea, I did not include it in my business plan, but I’m a professional educator and my dad made it work and I remember how he did it. Who knows, I might fill in a niche there, too.
This is never intended to be more than a sideline and the total income from the farm (we also finish hogs each year by reservation and deposit and sell a few hundred meat chickens) will only be a supplement to off farm income. But it does keep me young dreaming about it!
