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You can be a member with 20 as long as you intend to expand to 40 in 2 years you do not get some of the benefits of full members

So what are the benefits of becoming a Bee farmer and joining that Association please.

Anybody know?
 
Have a look on their web page. Right hand column " About the Bee Farmers Association of the UK" Sorry don't know how to link and its too long to copy.
 
yes commercial beekeepers always treat an apriary site as 1. not hive by hive but all hives on site are 1.
 
Forty colonies, seem to be the theoretical break even number!
This disqualifies the vast majority of British Beekeepers.
VM
 
So what are the benefits of becoming a Bee farmer and joining that Association please.

Anybody know?

Cheapest product liability insurance around, not to mention a nifty newsletter and bulk purchase opportunities.
 
QUOTE=Poly Hive;53454]What then?

You employ staff of course.

PH[/QUOTE]

Hi PH,
10,003 welcome back then.:grouphug::blush5::xmas-smiley-033:
 
Yes, let them swarm. They do a cursory inspection by breaking the double brood chambers and looking for cells. If they run young queens, they are unlikely to swarm anyway, so inspections are not cost effective
Adam

All my colonies seem to swarm every year. The only one that didnt this year, superceded, so I am planning to raise Qs from it.

I'd love to scale up my beekeeping to semi-commercial numbers, but I dont think I can until I get the swarming under control.
 
Comercial beekeeping is the easiest thing I've ever done LOL, Im also a millonaire, i just drive round looking at the crack between two brood boxes if they swarm they swarm.

If you believe that then you will believe anything, as my granddad always told me there ain't nothing but hardwork, bad back, and you wont ever make any money from bees.
 
Forty colonies, seem to be the theoretical break even number!
This disqualifies the vast majority of British Beekeepers.
VM

How are you defining breakeven? If you're paying yourself a wage out of it, you would have to be in the hundreds.
 
There's no real reason why you can't run an efficient profitable business on a small scale, even when you do account for your time. I wish I'd learned a lot more efficiency lessons before scaling up.
The real killer though is the hive average. At around 30lb reported most years as a national average (but even lower in 2012), nobody could make a profit. Is that a skill deficiency, poor bees or poor forage? All 3 can be addressed.
 
I generally get far more than that from my production stocks (not this year?).

Two hive owners don't have the luxury of umpteem available queens for replacing swarming queens and so lose a lot of potential crop. They still have sufficient honey for their own needs and a bit extra and that is all they often want.

Statistics are easily affected in this way (counting numerical replies of average crop rather than taking the number of production stocks into account).

Further, autumn feeding is often different for hobbyists ( I rarely feed sugar) and this is not taken into account for bare crop returns.
 
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