In Business with Bees How to Expand, Sell, and Market Honeybee Products and Services Including Pollination, Bees and Queens, Beeswax, Honey, and More

by Flottum, Kim

• ISBN13: 9781631594595
• ISBN10: 1631594591
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2018-09-11
• Publisher: Quarry Books

Summary

Ready to take your beekeeping skills to the next level? In Business with Bees provides the answers you need.

This book takes serious beekeepers past the beginning stages and learning curves and offers practical, useful advice to move your passion into a part-time or full-time career with measurable results. This beekeeping business how-to guide offers all of the in-depth advice you need, in one place.

• Writing a business plan
• Finding the best sources for funding
• Determining what your facilities will be and how to acquire them
• Getting and installing the right equipment
• Cooperating with other local businesses
• Stocking inventory and managing warehouse space
• Finding customers
• Raising and selling queens, packages, and nucs
• Expanding pollination, including contracts to protect you
• Making and selling peripheral products from wax, propolis, and honey
• Organizing teaching, speaking, and planning events
• Hiring and managing your growing team
• Promoting your business
• Measuring your success

This book provides solutions for all your beekeeping business questions, from start to finish. With this knowledge, you can become as knowledgeable, confident, and successful in running a business as you are in beekeeping.

Author Biography

Kim Flottum brings a background of more than a decade of plant science, honey bee research, and basic farming to his 30 years as the editor of Bee Culture magazine, where his main occupation is finding the answers to the multitude of questions that beginning, intermediate, and even advanced and experienced beekeepers bring to the table. He teaches beginning and advanced beekeeping courses, travels extensively to educate and lecture, and contributes to a variety of other publications on the basics of honey bees and beekeeping biology, the business of bees and pollination, producing and using varietal honeys, and a host of other subjects. He is the author of The Backyard Beekeeper, The Beekeeper's Journal, and In Business with Bees. His books, magazine articles, interviews, and blogs are widely read for both their fundamental and advanced contribution to beekeeping knowledge. His magazine platform gives voice to his social commentary on topics ranging from genetically modified foods to pesticide abuse to both good and bad government regulations in the industry. He is beekeeping's leading advocate for fundamental honey bee safety, including insuring excellent honey bee health, providing extraordinary forage, and minimizing the use of agricultural pesticides.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: Growing Your Operation—How Big Do You Want to Get?
More info on professional business planning, working with banks and USDA loan agencies, USDA programs for beginner agriculture

• Trading Time for Money
• Business Goals and Bigger Pictures
• Buying Equipment
• Breakthrough: Lease Land for Beeyards
• Expanding Your Honey House

Chapter 2: A New Look at Honey Production
De-emphasis on honey production due to increased competition with foreign honey and smaller returns. Meanwhile focusing on how to grow margins on local honey when volume is lower. 

• What it Once Was and Why It Changed
• Non-Agricultural Areas
• Expanding Natural Bloom
• Migratory Beekeeping for Nectar Crops
• Planning a Honey Crop
• Growing Your Own, with Help
• How Much Land Is Required?
• Working with Landowners with Lots of Land
• Recommended Plantings for Honey Bees
• This Land Is My Land

Chapter 3: Royalty—Finding the Best Queen

• Royal Lineage
• The Queens We Can Get
• What Do You Want from Your Bees?
• What Kind of Beekeeper Are You?
• Buying Queens
• Raising Your Own Queens
• Raising Production Queens
• Background Check for Drone Colonies

Chapter 4: The Working Class—The Bees that Beekeepers Keep
Enhanced chapter for better moneymaking. Far less basic beekeeping info, more focus on having the right bees, timing, and methods. Keeping bees is easier if you’re not making honey, so this is a new shift. Updating electronic monitoring equipment and cloud storage options, but more important is not the how but the why: economics, labor, speed.

• Preventing Springtime Swarming
• All About Honey Production
• Pests and Other Problems

Chapter 5: Pollination
Writing contracts, equipment needed, understanding pesticides, partnering with other beekeepers and pollination brokers, moving to staging yards, protection/nutrition in staging yards, working with growers on providing forage, and how to calculate your fee.

Chapter 6: Wintering Your Bees
Wintering indoors has become more popular and efficient and may no longer require building a separate structure—rather than moving bees to southern climates. Traditional wintering outside is also covered.

• Winter Rules
• Take Care of the Bees
• The Natural Question
• How Much Honey?
• When It’s Really Cold
• Pollen

Summary
Glossary
Resources
Suppliers
Index
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments