Advice on up-scaling production

[jeff33]

I am currently working with 12 hives at all stages (7 set-up as production hives), a straggler, couple of AS since last week and a nuc. I usually use my profit to re-invest in equipment and sold 2 overwinter nucs last week to buy more equipment.

Ideally I would like to have enough hives to sustain the production of several nucs a year for sale (5-6), queen rearing for personal use and a few spare for sale and go into winter with at least 6 nucs to use as back-up or brood factories.

I have already found limitations with my current set-up as I have used a fair bit of bees for my mating nucs and won't have enough bees/brood to populate all the nucs for the queens I just produced without potentially impacting on the production hives and profit.

The advice I am after from those who have gone through this is what would be a suitable number of hives to sustain what I plan to do (I still work F/T so this wouldn't be a bread earner for now)? Should I bite the bullet with profit and focus on making splits this year or should I do what I can with what I have this year and maybe sacrifice a couple of production hives after the main flow to split into nucs to overwinter?

All advice welcome...well positive advice!

 

[For want of a better word]

Good question

50 colonies would give you enough bees for nucs and possibly still provide a worthwhile honey crop.

But ... how long is a piece of string???

Chons da

 

[jeff33]

50 becomes a serious number requiring a fair bit of time to manage. I am lucky enough to work from home 2-3 days a week which helps a lot and having my furthest apiary 20 minutes drive away. Thanks.

 

[jaybee76]

I've been through a similar process to you but a little but further on. I've separated the two enterprises completely with one apiary solely for breeding and nuc production, and the others for production only (around 20 hives). I did have them mixed in the past but found it less easy to manage and inevitably bees are taken from production hives to feed nucs etc.

Now the only reason the two overlap is if I move a nuc to the production hives to replace a queen for whatever reason (or very early in the year to replace any hive that didn't overwinter) or the other way if I've AS'd any hives (I split the hive into parent colony and two nucs).

The nucs produce the nucs (the nucs I have in May will typically get split at least twice so five nucs in April equals 15 in September) and also supplies the bees for the mating nucs. I have my breeder queen colony and two others run as cell starters at this mating apiary.

I am quite lucky that my mating apiary is large running alongside a field margin with plenty of places close by for mating nucs.