To make honey, you’ll have to get out into the fields, closer to the flowering plants, and equip the apiary. The task is, frankly, not from the lungs, because the bees, although they work without days off and smoke, but require certain conditions of maintenance and care.
Fragrant sweet honey is not such a simple product as it might seem at first glance.
And it is primarily about its production, in which the usual scheme «to buy equipment – to buy raw materials – to make a finished product» does not work.
Where to start?
The first thing to remember, if you decided to tackle beekeeping, is the fact that agriculture (and in this industry you will work) carries very high risks. This is precisely the sphere of activity, which largely depends not on the efforts of the entrepreneur, but on unpredictable weather conditions. For example, if the spring is cold, then the bee family will develop more slowly and may not have time to gain strength to the basic honey.
As a consequence, the main bribe may bring less honey than originally planned. In this situation, as you can see, there are a lot of «ifs», «maybe» and «would», which eloquently hints – it is extremely difficult to forecast it.
And nevertheless, to a certain extent, you can secure your business by properly preparing for the start. First, you need to assess the food base, i.e. what honey plants are in the region, how many of them, when they give off nectar. You can do it with the help of special calendars of flowering plants. They contain information about when the blossoms are flowing and how much nectar they allocate per 1 hectare of area.
Next is to get acquainted with local beekeepers and find out from them how much honey they collect on average for the season. And it is better to ask 5-7 people and find out information not about one year. It is desirable to collect statistics for 10 years to again reduce risks. Find out what method of beekeeping your colleagues use – a nomad apiary or a stationary apiary.
Think about what breed of bees works best. The ideal option is to choose those bees that are most adapted to local conditions. For example, Central Russian bees tolerate frosts well, are resistant to a number of diseases, are effective in late strong honey gathering. They are recommended for the Central, North-Western, Privolzhsky, Ural, Siberian federal districts. But bees of this breed are considered very aggressive, and many beekeepers do not like to work with them.
Another breed of bees – the gray mountain caucasus – is recommended for use in the regions of the North Caucasus, Central, Volga and Southern federal districts. It has a distinctive feature – a long proboscis due to which the bee can collect nectar and pollinate those plants where other bee breeds will not reach.
But it’s not enough just to buy bees of the right breed, you also need to take care of the commercial component of your business.
Here there are two ways: wholesale sales and sales to the retail consumer. The first scenario assumes that you need a sufficiently large volume of production, a large number of bees (at least 60 families), and therefore a significant investment.
Those who have no experience in this area at all, it is better to start small and get ready to work with retail customers. Carry out a small marketing study, see where and how other apiaries sell products: who does this successfully, and who does not, and why?
You can also try to take honey from someone and sell it, ring up potential customers, find out the price, terms of cooperation and preferably work out your sales channels. This way is more troublesome, but the surcharge is much higher than for wholesale sales.
It should be remembered that besides bee honey, honeybees also provide many other useful products: propolis, wax, pearl, royal jelly, pollen, etc. Some of these products can be obtained without harm to the basic honey collection and, thereby, increase the profitability of the apiary.
Everyone knows that honey can be of all kinds: flower, buckwheat, chestnut, lime … Those species that are the least in the market usually cost more. The kind of honey that beekeeping will produce depends on which honey growers grow in larger numbers in your region. But you can get into your piggy bank and more rare varieties, organizing a long distance travel for the right honey.
