OMG! You must have a lot of land? I live in the middle of a neighborhood and the houses arent in arms distance but Im thinking I could go as far as five...if I indeed get "THE BUG" and well, the last time I decided I needed to do something fun and for myself....I planted one rosebush...that ended up to be more than 20 along with everything else I planted!! I went crazy for sure!! so now that I have all these wonderful plants I decided I needed bees to share them with! What do you do with all that lushes gold? LOL
Heather
*LOL* Nope, no land to speak of.. we live on a 500 sq metre section in town... an 8th of an acre or thereabouts. :)
I work in town for a hort consultancy and my husband manages an organic blueberry block which is part of a larger organic cropping farm. When we were thinking of something we could do together to eventually get out of the wage-slave life, we (heaven knows how) came up with beekeeping. We have two hives at home, but the rest are out on the farm. As we grow we'll be looking to start outyards on other farmers properties.
We sell the honey to a local large honey packer. We take our boxes down to them and they do the extraction (for a fee of course) and buy all our honey from us. A week later we go pick up our boxes of wet frames, and a month later the money's all in the bank. Lets us concentrate on being beekeepers rather than honey processors or salespeople.
Later on we'll look at perhaps some niche products, probably picking up on the organic focus, but for now we're focussed on learning to run the bees the best we can.
As for how much honey we eat... uuhhh.. maybe half a cup between us all year, and that's just tasting bits off the hive occasionally. Neither of us are big honey eaters. :roll: