Having sold a few bee hives in the past I would suggest it's not as easy as it seems
You get messed around a lot and need the patience of a saint
Having sold a few bee hives in the past I would suggest it's not as easy as it seems
You get messed around a lot and need the patience of a saint
you can get messed about, but usually they are there because they want a colony. If you say its ok, dont worry, if you dont like the colony for sale, I have a couple of other people interested, they usually cut to the chase.
I hate beekeepers that hold court about how their methods are the best - but they are buying colonies from me..... so cant be that brilliant or they would be selling themselves..
Whatever happened to that site http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...ial+beekeeping looks like it never got off the ground.
The other one http://beesandnucs.com/wp/ has not been updated since March 2014. There was me excited about an earlier post talking about 2K profit from a couple of insects looks like I choose the wrong career earlier in life.
£30 for a queen 300 queens =£3000 pounds tax free converted to euros thats €4131 nice, Nucs @ €120 a couple of hundred of them say 300 thats €36000 plus the queens gives a grand total of €40131 tax free. All done on Facebook, Im off just to hand in my notice.
I had an interesting discussion with a commercial fisherman from the North earlier in the year he was telling me about fishing on a commercial scale and I was flabbergasted by the money and where he was fishing, i told him about beekeeping and he started doing figures for me I laughed thought he was pulling my leg, where is his number now.
Rearing queens in the UK or Ireland is a labour of love as opposed to a lucrative business although you can turn a profit at it if you know what you are doing.
The serious work starts in March getting the drone colonies ready but you only have about 3 months for sales - mid June to mid September.
I have hardly had a free day in the past 3 months.
If you are in Southern Europe it must be a lot easier with the longer season and the better weather.
Rearing even 300 mated queens is a hell of a lot of work and that is going to generate about £10,000 minus running expenses such as feed, cages, postage etc.
You also need to spend a few thousand quid to set up to get a sufficient number of mini nucs.
If you talk to any of the queen rearers in Ireland they will tell you it is easier to make a profit from selling honey than from raising queens.
Aoife Nic Giolla Coda will tell you as much.
The other option of selling nucs, again superficially it looks easy and fairly lucrative but anytime I have sold nucs I find that the purchaser thinks he is also buying a couple of years aftercare which involves me sorting out ongoing problems during that period. That's ok if you only sell the odd one but if you are going to do it as a business you can't give away your time free of charge like that.
A jon your trying to put me off the lucrative market.
1. First off ill have 3 queens for sale, Buckfast €20, Carolina €25 and AMM €30, ill use the false comparasion trick using the first two ill set a base rate then emphasise the benifits of the AMM result Sold AMM
2. Create the illusion of demand eg when you Phone "if operators are busy please call again" rather than saying Operators are waiting please call, this creates the illusion that we are busy and everyone wants to buy my bees.
3. Bundle the costs an example of this is if your buying a tree for the garden the best time to sell you a stake is when you are commited to spending some money any way, I would also sell you a tree tie, Potting compost, if i thought you had money maybe a spade and wheelbarrow, same for bees Bees, Nuc, Hive, floor food etc...........
4. Induce feelings of obligations, when people get something for nothing the feel oblidged to return the favour, give you money.
There is an art to selling you just have to press the right buttons.
Just look what Amazon did to the book selling market......... lets hope Jeff bezos does not get into this market, ill give him a call as were friends on facebook.
Selling native queens is easy. I can sell everything I produce without even advertising widely.
But if you are working as a sole trader there is a limit to how much work you can fit into a day.
The bit involving grafting and checking apideas is the easy bit.
Anyone with a bit of experience could do 100 grafts in less than an hour.
Getting mated queens into cages with 6 or 7 workers and posting them and dealing with all the customer e-mails takes a lot of time.
Very enjoyable work but I have not worked out how to get rich quick yet.
You'll just have to double/treble your output and get an acre of land for all them apideas ! Might not be such a bad idea there is plenty of farmers willing to take income for land that is just growing grass !
...and then you pick up an injury just as the season's starting to get going.Originally Posted by Jon
They sounded so good that my grasshopper mind stumbled on this:
South Carolina Beekeepers Queen Rearing
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rc...02022582,d.d2s
Quite a nice read which also includes this link to a short pdf that some here will like:
Failing queens-- Hope from local sources by Andrew Rausch
http://www.scstatebeekeepers.org/Res...A%20Rausch.pdf
Apologies to PH for the serious thread drift.
Last edited by prakel; 09-09-2015 at 05:17 PM.
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