Getting into the Bee Business
Boats, Bees, Battlestar Galactica
I’m a bit of an odd duck, I like to get into certain hobbies or niche interests and think that it’s a good substitute for having a personality. Case in point, when I bought my house, I got really in to reading thejoyofmoldings.com after I closed on my 70’s trilevel house, I was determined to do something to increase the value of the house, and somehow decided that craftsman trim and badass crown molding was going to be the next bitcoin. So I learned all about how to do that and had some fun doing it!
Kelley bravely endured my many trips to lowes with 12ft crown molding sticking through the rear window of my truck, spackled nail holes, shooed me away to paint areas properly with finesse, and put up with all the hours it took to get things to look right. Someone had to stand at the other end of that crown molding while I was trying to reload my nailer!
Well, my love of trim carpentry is still a little over the top, but one can’t spend their whole lives going room to room scratching that itch. You eventually run out of house!
Woodworking is also a great hobby that I intend on chasing and taking on projects that are out of my depth the rest of my life. Nevertheless, I would not be Andrew Zetts if I wasn’t getting sidetracked by the next big thing that might be a good way to get into a side hustle. And that next thing for me is Beekeeping. Add interest in a new hobby to the fact that I have nothing to do while I’m feeding and rocking Teddy to sleep and thus able to watch endless beekeeping youtube videos and you’ll get a full blown obsession.
You might be thinking to yourself, wait, aren’t you already too busy with your new child and trying to build a boat at the same time? Yes. But also, relax! the bees do all the hard work. You pretty quickly learn the importance of staying out of their way. I think. According to the bee videos I’ve watched.
Introduction into beekeeping
My coworker took a beekeeping course put on by Michigan State University, and has kept bees for a couple years. I had always been pretty impressed by her for doing that, and took a shine to the idea that in theory I’d one day take that course and raise some bees of my own. Of course, I was working on a house and planning on moving and could never really find the time to take an online class. Finally, this winter I had the time to take the online course put on by the Connecticut Beekeepers Association, and I ordered three colonies for this spring.
Three colonies would allow me to learn about the nectar flows during the spring-summer-fall, I’d see 3 different hives in 3 different scenarios and learn 3 times as much as I try to raise these hives to survive disease, nectar/pollen dearths and build up enough stores to try to survive the winter. At the end of it all, I’d be able to dabble in biology, and in June/July I might even be able to get some honey out of it! So far so good.
I would like to stress, that for me at this point in time, this is all still an exercise in hands on learning about honey bees. They’re incredibly complicated, with scenarios changing for a single hive year over year depending on the weather. Factor in the geographical changes in bee breeds, plants, weather, etc. and you’ll never ever be able to stop learning, whether it’s raising bees in Hawaii, pollinating Almond trees in California, or overwintering bees in -40F weather in Manitoba Canada.
This is all fascinating to me, and helps to defend my enthusiasm for diving into the hobby. As my wife very dryly noted, “You don’t even eat the honey we have in the kitchen” . (I do, sometimes. More now just to prove her wrong.) Because she already knows. This is where the Andrew Zetts factor (delusions of grandeur) kicks in.
Could I turn this into a business?
Having turned 33 last week, I have lots of energy, passable work ethic, and enthusiasm when it comes to trying something new. If I’m out there working hard on a hobby that interests me and also has the potential to allow me break even financially, well, that would be icing on the cake.
I’ve got the good fortune of living on a property with plenty of distance from neighbors, in rural Connecticut where there is plenty of space and agriculture in the area. The property as it stands does not really have any real traditional agricultural opportunity, I am not agriculturally inclined outside of basic gardening, nor do I want to raise livestock. But it would be a great place to run bees.
Farmers without borders
For sake of argument, let’s say you’re someone with a job looking at raising cattle as a hobby, and you don’t already own land and farm equipment, inherited from family or otherwise. A very rough back of the envelope calculation as I am a city slicker (sorry Grandpa) would suggest that you’d have to buy about 2 acres per calf/cow pair, for the prospect of earning sustained income raising cattle each year. Using the table below and wanting to earn $30,000 a year to justify the effort, you would need 150 acres of land. Well, what is the mortgage on that land, payments on equipment per year? I don’t know, I am not sure how much you’d have to scale up in order break even.
The point is, farming can’t happen without land, and if you don’t have land, then it’s an expensive proposition to get started from scratch, even more so if it’s just for a hobby.
On the other hand: Beekeeping is very much an agricultural endeavor, with animal husbandry, pollination services, growing and selling bees, and of course, selling honey. The difference with bees, is they don’t understand boundary lines. You don’t need acreage to support a beehive, bees will fly to wherever the nectar is. In fact, many farmers would appreciate the offer for you to set up a bee yard along one of their fields. I don’t know how much it would normally cost to buy a 1-2% increase in crop yield, but that is very much a calculation that a farmer is aware of!
All this just to say that I find beekeeping to be a pretty interesting way to put the surrounding land to work as a hobby, with potential as a source of income. (I’m under no illusion that I would ever break even in woodworking) This assumes that I am able to learn how to grow and split hives at a controlled rate to mitigate losses due to winter and diseases, and build the hive equipment to keep up with expansion. This in turn will require learning how to keep bees on a larger scale, requiring hard work and running into ever more varied hive conditions.
But first, I’ll have to try to keep 3 beehives alive through a year, build some confidence and figure out what the hell I’m doing. I assure you, this pipedream plan will go to shit probably within the first 3 months of owning bees.
Next time I’ll talk about installing my 3 different hives, and complain about all the rain starving my bees.
Boat news
I have been very lax in attempting to blog about the boat. I’m making progress, and have laid and glued 4 layers of cedar strips on, so progress is being made. I’ll catch up on the blog, stick with me. Maybe I should add a paid subscription tier for readers who want boat progress, not bee blogs.