The First-Year Hive Budget

Budget your first two years of bees: the winter stores that come before any honey, the start priced, sugar and the colony you replace as lines, the harvest as a range rounded down, a pound's cost, and the break-even at your own price.

LevelBee's Honey Harvest Calculator multiplies supers, frames and the weight a frame holds into pounds of honey, and its own page says a new package or nucleus colony makes no surplus in its first season. No tool on the site met money: what the hives cost before the first pound, what a colony lost over winter does to next year's harvest, what a pound of your own honey costs, and when it pays back. The First-Year Hive Budget works it out. An example: two hives cost $1,338 in year one, with no honey. Budget the colony you replace in spring (Auburn University's latest survey put losses at 39.9%, so two hives budget one), and year two has one colony on honey supers: 35.7 lb on a poor flow to 59.5 lb on a good one, rounded down, after the 60 to 90 lb of winter stores extension services say a colony keeps. Over two years a pound costs $27.75 to $45.64; at $10.00 a pound, year one is paid back after 5 more years on good flows or 21 on poor ones, and $12.75 a pound repays it in three good years. Every figure is an example computed by the code the site's calculators run; it promises no honey and no saving. The harvest is honey supers only, never the brood boxes. It has no line for mites and gives no treatment, medication or dose: for mites, use only a product registered where you live, exactly as its label says. It carries a veil on the first shopping list and MedlinePlus's sting emergency signs. You get a 24-page printable budget with four working pages, and a personalised sheet worked from the numbers you entered in our calculators.

Look inside

Two full pages from the budget, exactly as printed. Click either to read it at full size before you decide.

What is in it

• Step 1: the winter stores a colony keeps, from two extension services, counted in full deep frames before any honey is yours
• Step 2: the start priced line by line (boxes, supers, bees, veil, smoker), with no extractor in year one, and the sting emergency signs
• Step 3: sugar as a budget line at your price, with Mississippi State's heavy syrup recipe and feeding cut-off
• Step 4: the colony you replace each spring, budgeted at Auburn University's survey loss figure and rounded up
• Step 5: the year-two harvest as a range from honey supers only, from the site's own Honey Harvest Calculator, rounded down
• Step 6: two years of spending divided by the honey, and the extractor counted in harvests before buying pays
• Step 7: the break-even at your own price per pound, and the price that repays year one in three years
• Four working pages: a hive start sheet, a stores and feed log, a harvest sheet and a two-year budget card
• Reference tables: honey by supers and frame size, colonies to replace by hive count, winter stores in frames, and units
• A quickstart that closes the loop on your own before-and-after scores

The budget picks up where the free Honey Harvest Calculatorleaves off. The calculator turns supers, frames and the weight a frame holds into pounds of honey, and its own page says a new colony makes no surplus in its first season. The budget meets that with money: the winter stores a colony keeps (about 60 to 90 lb of honey by extension guidance, your local figure first) counted in full frames, the start priced, sugar as a line item, the colony you replace each spring at Auburn University's survey loss figure, the year-two harvest as a range from honey supers only, rounded down, the cost of a pound over two years, the extractor rented until the math says buy, and the break-even at your own price. It uses the Winter Preparation Checklist and the Hive Weight Monitor for the stores. Every price and figure in it is an example. It has no line for mites and gives no treatment, medication or dose: for mites, use only a product registered where you live, exactly as its label says. It carries the sting emergency signs from MedlinePlus and a veil on the first shopping list. No honey and no saving is promised.