How To Make Money With Honey Bees

Image by Thomas Völcker from Pixabay

For most of my life I was both amazed and fearful of honey bees. For that matter, I have always been fearful of anything with a stinger. When I decided to take up beekeeping as a hobby part of my decision was to help me conquer my fear of THE STING. I would love to sit here today and tell you I did that very thing, but I can't. At least not entirely. I still hold a bit more than a healthy fear of the sting, but I don't have near the problem with it that I had when I started keeping bees. Someday I hope to be free, but for now I will still don my beesuit about 50% of the time depending on weather, time of day, and what I'll be doing in the hive.

Even though getting over my fear of "the sting" was a big factor in getting into beekeeping, it is not what has kept me in beekeeping. After a few months of learning all I could about the bees I began to see much more than just getting a little honey from the bees. I started researching the health benefits of the products the bees made. The list is much longer than just honey and wax. MUCH LONGER! I started seeing the need for more beekeepers. There is just too much demand for the products and not nearly enough suppliers. But just try to get a straight answer from a beekeeper about how much money can be made in beekeeping. I guess like any business people are always afraid of competition. I kinda see this whole beekeeping thing differently than others. I see it as having such a broad range of opportunities that even if everyone got involved it would actually be able to support everyone that wanted to pursue the opportunities. Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I'm not. So in this blog I'm going to share with you some of what beekeepers do to earn a living with honey bees.

1. Make Money With Honey

Almost everyone gets into beekeeping in hopes of harvesting the sweet stuff. If you look online and try to determine how much honey you can harvest from one hive per year you will get dozens of different responses. Why? Because there are way too many variables to consider when asking the question. Things like location, strength of the colony, length of the season, age of the queen, management of the hive, weather, and many other things can contribute to how well a colony does in a year. Lets just say that you have a good colony and all factors are at least average for the first year. You may get as much as 100 lbs of honey. Honey sells at $8 a pound. Some folks get even more. It all depends on how you market your honey and how well you can educate your customer on the benefits of the honey.  Lets just keep it at $8 per pound for this discussion. Lets also assume you are going to sell all of your harvest. You just made $800 for giving the bees a home and receiving honey for rent. Not bad!

2. Wax

There is an old saying in beekeeping that for every 8 pounds of honey you will get one pound of wax. I don't know if this is accurate, but for this article we are just gonna roll with it. So now we know how much wax the hive in #1 is going to make. Lets just round it off to 12 pounds. How much you can sell that wax for is laced with many variables. To name a few are color, chemical free hive, purity and refinement. Just with these the price range could be $4-$15 per pound. Depending on the time of year, availability, and your customer it could sell higher. Just for fun we're gonna stick with $850 per pound. So our hive has now made $102 worth of wax. We now have a total profit of $902 from our bee biz.

3. Pollen

If you are a beekeeper more than a few minutes someone is gonna ask you if you sell pollen. I promise you this will happen eventually. There are many reasons why people want the pollen. Just google it and you will see. Pollen is a great money maker, and it is not too difficult to collect. The biggest problem with it is you have to be careful not to collect too much or it could do severe damage to your colony. You could actually kill them if you collect too much. They need it to raise their young. If their young don't survive, the colony doesn't survive. This process needs to be watched closely, thus the high price for pollen. So how much pollen can you collect from a hive? I would say that you could safely collect 20 pounds in a season. That is the entire season though. I would strongly advise against trying to collect more than that in a season from one hive, and you need to be certain that the one hive is very very strong. Because pollen is so crucial to the bees and it does take a lot of attention to make certain not to take too much the price is high. You can expect to get anywhere from $10-$20 per pound for the pollen. We'll split the difference and call it $15 per pound. There you have another $300 from your bees. Let's move on to the next product.

4. Propolis

What in the world is PROPOLIS??? Well, let me tell you. It is as sticky as chewing gum on your shoe sole. No kidding, and it is just about the same consistency. Bees make this sticky mess by retrieving sap from trees along with other oils and fats that they can find, add a bit of their own spit, chew it up and spit it out all over the inside of the hive. They use it to seal drafts in the hive, kill germs with its antibacterial properties, make medicine for the baby nursery, and God knows what else. It has recently become a huge demand item from the hive because  people are finding that it contains big health benefits for humans. Some have even mentioned it as being central in healing certain cancers. No scientific proof of this as of yet, but it has been said. So how much for this sticky stuff? Currently it is selling like crazy at and average price of $10 per ounce! Look around on the internet and you'll see. I can promise you one thing, this price will go up as soon as medical research starts confirming a few of the things it is purported to accomplish. But how much can you collect in a season? Keep in mind there are certain strains of bees that will produce this stuff in abundance, and some who don't really seem to know how to make it. We're gonna say we harvest 20 ounces this year, at $10 per ounce that's another $200 from the hive. So in hive products alone we have managed to earn $1402 for the year. But wait, there's more!

5. Pollination

Did you know that over 2 million hives are shipped out to the west coast each year just to pollinate the almond trees growing there? Did you know that the beekeepers who own those hives are paid well for making sure the bees are available for this? I've done little research on this topic, but I've done enough to know that some companies are paying good money for this. I won't get into the actual numbers here because I don't participate in this end of the industry, but I do know that it is very lucrative. You can do your own research on this to get the details on it for yourself, just know that the opportunity is out there.

6. Queens

Yes that's right, you can purchase your very own queen right from the interwebs! All you need is a credit card and a mailing address. Many of the larger pollination operations are in constant need of queen breeders. $40 per queen seems to be a good average price for a queen. Yes, that's right, $40 for one bug. How many can you produce? Some people are selling a couple thousand a year. There is a company in Hawaii that is selling 3 million queens a year. Do you think there might be a market for queens? I do...

7. Bees

Last but not least...bees. You can sell a colony of bees to other beekeepers. You can sell them in packages of two or three pounds. These usually go for about $150 to $175 per package. Or you can sell them as a nucleus colony, or "nuc" for short. This is a predetermined amount of frames filled with honeycomb, honey, brood in all stages, covered with bees, and a queen. This is the very best way to buy bees. People will drive for hours to purchase bees from the most local supplier. Locally acquired bees are usually acclimated to the area better than bees that are shipped in from another state. Bees are very sensitive to climate changes and moving them too far could kill them. Buy local as best you can. Nucs can be sold very easily at $200 to $250 dollars. The reason for the higher price is simple. You are getting an already established colony that does not have to wait to build comb before the queen can begin laying. There is not only strength in numbers, but when it comes to buying bees there is also value in numbers.

I hope this article has been helpful to you. Please consider getting into beekeeping. It is possibly one of the most rewarding thing you could ever do. God bless!