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By: David Burns
In my first few years as a new beekeeper, I thought that becoming a better beekeeper meant you started to have more hives. Even though I only started with one hive, it didn’t take too many years until it was hard to find space to put another hive. Like many beekeepers, I went from one to two, then ten to twenty and before long one hundred. I was focused on honey production, and it made sense that more hives meant more honey.
I’ve given considerable thought to why beekeepers have the number of bees they have. Consider the hobbyist (1-50). They usually start with one or two hives. This makes sense because the first year is the honeymoon of beekeeping. Even though there are a large number of first-year beekeepers who quit after their first year, many continue on, adding more and more hives to their apiary. But why do we land on the number that we have?
For some, it’s a formula in knowing how many hives are needed to produce enough honey to try to convince yourself you are paying for your hobby. Let’s face it, it feels good to have a great honey year, make good money from honey sales, especially if you never consider the actual money you spent to produce that honey. Others know how many hives they need to sell nucs or to raise queens. I think the hobbyist usually ends up with a particular number of hives out of circumstance. One hive swarms and now you have two. Then you make a split and now you have three. Your friends know you are a beekeeper, so you pick up two or three more swarms in the area and now, just like that, you are up to ten hives your second year.
For some beekeepers having more hives elevates your status in your local bee club or area. When people hear you have 100 or 500 hives, they conclude you are a good beekeeper and you know what you are doing, which, hopefully, is true, especially if you have the same large number of hives year after year. With enough money, anyone can have a large number of hives their first year. But keeping them alive and healthy year after year is a whole different ball of wax.
The sideliner (51-500) definitely has an agenda, a specific plan that might include pollination, nuc and queen sales and providing honey to a much larger market. Most sideliners remain a one-person show. Don’t let anyone fool you. Caring for hundreds of colonies is very demanding, especially if you are working another job full-time.
Finally, a sideliner may continue to grow and may bump up to the commercial level of over 500 colonies. This number is still sometimes managed by a single beekeeper who is extremely good at managing their time and has an enormous amount of energy.
I’m going to be honest. The more hives I gained, the worse beekeeper I became, largely due to having a full-time job, raising a family and not having the time to attend to every individual hive’s needs. I slowly started reducing the number of hives to match what I had time to manage. When I had fewer than five hives, I knew which one might need a new queen or that mite counts were climbing. With twenty, it was harder to prevent swarms or test and treat for mites, and with one hundred, I worked triage, trying to keep my weakest hives alive. It was too much with everything else I was doing.
For me, more hives resulted in diminishing returns. Oddly enough, I really didn’t make more honey with one hundred hives. Fewer than twenty hives allowed me to focus on learning by observing and working each hive. But somewhere between twenty-five and fifty, I was spending less time thinking and studying each hive. So, for me, more colonies started making me a worse beekeeper. I had the skills, but my time was so divided as my apiary grew that colonies began to suffer.
I’m not advocating that small-scale is better. Commercial and sideliner beekeepers obviously have their reasons for having large numbers of colonies and they can give each hive the attention needed. But I’ve found that the right number of colonies is the number that I can manage well, not how many I can put on my property. It seems like I can get the same amount or even more honey with fewer colonies. Maybe there is less competition. Maybe it’s because I’ve got time to keep each colony stronger. Poorly managed colonies usually don’t make much honey.
Let’s face it, it’s fun to go all out in beekeeping and buy equipment, pallets of boxes and frames, but it’s more than having enough equipment. It’s about having the attention that each hive demands. This year I had to buy so much new equipment, such as bottom boards, boxes, frames and top covers. Will I get a return on that investment?
I used to buy into the saying “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Beekeeping proves that wrong. I love beekeeping and working hives, but it turned into a lot of hard work and long days. I reached a number where I wasn’t having fun anymore.
On the flip side, when I had only one or two colonies in the beginning, there was nothing I could really compare one hive to, and it was too risky to try to experiment with just one or two colonies. For me, I’m still trying to find the sweet spot, the number of hives that I can manage well and still enjoy my other hobbies, family and interests.
For some, the sweet spot might be ten colonies, but fifty for another. For another, it could be five hundred. I don’t think there is a magic number that fits all of us. What we need to consider is at what number it stops being fun. So now I’m wondering: How many colonies I can keep well, and still have fun keeping bees?
