Costs and revenues

I'm intending on doing a hive inspection this afternoon, as well as installing the new colony this evening - very exciting - watch this space. Also, I'm planning on taking loads of photos for the record and also to make this blog more interesting. However, for now here's something completely different......

It's certainly not my intention to keep bees commercially, and as I've stated already my interest is primarily in the husbandry and nature conservation angles. However, since I've shelled out a fair amount of cash so far, I thought I should keep some tabs on how this is stacking up, and whether I might even be able to recoup my outlay.

I'm sitting on a fair amount of kit: 3 broodboxes, 7 supers, full sets of frames in all these (plus an extra set of super frames), 2 hive stands, a couple of dummy boards, 2 bee suits (tops, veils and gloves actually), 2 smokers, hive tools, some feeders, some basic honey extraction kit and some queen marking kit. I've gone for "budget" kit on nearly everything, and the total cost is still just under 800 quid. Not cheap but there's quite a bit of kit and much of it should last well.

Now, I'm OK having just shelled out this cash as a sunk cost to invest in a new and fascinating hobby. However, looking at how I can recoup these costs by selling a few jars, I thought I'd make some assumptions about over how many years to amortise costs of larger items of kit. For example, say the hives last 10 year (should be much longer, I hope), the frames 3, and so on. I'll also I assume I can sell a jar of honey for 5 quid which is perhaps unlikely since I'd probably have to go through a reseller to have any volume whatsoever. Making these assumptions, and looking at how much it costs to jar up the honey (about 50p per jar with the labels and lids included) I will need to sell around 23 jars to cover this year's costs. Of course, since the costs are amortised I'll then have to go on making similar further sales in future years to cover those future amortised costs. Alternatively, if I assume I take all costs up front, I'll need to sell 167 jars to cover my costs. Hhmmmmm......looking at the comparison of the numbers popping out from these methods implies I've put an average life of 7.25 years on my kit - perhaps not conservative but probably not totally unrealistic if I look after it. Although I'm sure I've missed out some future costs (such as disease prevention measures, food, extra kit and so on), all in all breaking even does not seem too ambitious to me, and I'll like to try to sell enough jars over the years to cover my costs just for the fun of it. However, it's clear to see that keeping bees commercially would require a very large scale operation.