Upscaling from Hobbyist to Sideliner Beekeeping - The Bees (319)

319 - Upscaling from Hobbyist to Sideliner Beekeeping - The Bees

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Jeff: Hey everybody, welcome to the show. Welcome to this first of our February upscaling your beekeeping operations series. Becky, this is going to be a fun series for our listeners.

Becky: Especially since we have two of my favorite beekeepers ever as our first guests. We are in good shape for this episode.

Jeff: Absolutely. Before we introduce you, guests, for our listeners, who haven't been listening since, I don't know, December or sometime, this month, we are doing a special upscaling your beekeeping operations series. It's for those beekeepers who have several years under their belt already and are looking to move from hobbyist to sideliner. What are those things that you need to think about? We have a four-part series for the month of February for you. The first starting today is managing or upscaling your bees and your bee operation. What do you have to consider?

The second part two, next week, we're going to talk about upscaling all your equipment and those considerations to manage a larger operation. Part three, in two weeks, we'll be upscaling your honey house. What do you need to consider when you go from hobbyist, in your kitchen, to what do you need to process all that honey and wax and everything else you need to do in the honey house. In the last week of this month, we'll be covering all the mental shifts that you have to do as a sideliner beekeeper. We'll talk about some of the business aspects, some of the other things you can do as a sideliner to generate income, and we'll have special guests then.

Becky: Jeff, are we going to have a fifth series of how to find more hours in the day? Daylight hours, preferably?

Jeff: Daylight hours would be preferred, that's for sure. I'd like to introduce our first guest this week is Meghan Milbrath and Ana Heck. Ladies, welcome to Beekeeping Today Podcast.

Megan: Thank you.

Ana: Thank you.

Becky: I think we should start by having each of you introduce yourselves because you really do wear a couple of different hats. You are professional beekeepers and you are beekeepers. Meghan, why don't you start by telling us about who you are both in and out of your real job?

Megan: Sure. My joke is that it's all beekeeping all the time. It happens in different places. My real job, which is important because we are talking about sideliners, is that I work at Michigan State University in the entomology department as an assistant professor, so I'm half research, half extension, and then I teach at the veterinary school, and so it's all bees there. Then my side job is that I run a beekeeping operation in Jackson County, Michigan.

Becky: How many bees do you run, Meghan, personally?

Megan: It has fluctuated because I've been traveling, but I think for this winter, it's about 70 hives. The most that I've had is 200, and that was when I was not working for one or two years. Usually, it's 70 to 100-ish.

Becky: Ana, can you tell us about who you are, please?

Ana: Sure. I work with Meghan at Michigan State University. I'm an apiculture extension educator. I get to work a lot with beekeepers, and then I also work with people in Michigan who want to support pollinators. That includes people like land managers, pesticide users, and home gardeners. I started keeping my own bees in 2015 when I worked with the University of Minnesota Bee Squad. I got two packages of my own, but I was also at the time managing a lot of colonies in partnership with the Bee Squad. Then I moved to Michigan in 2019, and my husband and I are currently managing about 70 colonies.

Becky: I remember back in Minnesota when your bees just didn't die. Do you ever lose them now?

Ana: Knock on wood, we've been pretty lucky.

Becky: That's what I figured.

Ana: There can be good years and bad years.

Jeff: Welcome to the show. Meghan, welcome back to the show. Ana, welcome the first time to the show. This is going to be fun. Where to start on this? If someone wants to expand their operation, and let's say they have, let's say, 20 colonies right now and they want to start expanding and grow up to the 70, let's explore the options of how they can do this. I guess there's several main options, but let's talk about this.

Becky: I'm going to back us up. How do you know if you're ready to upscale? We all have dreams. I personally have dreams, but a lot of us have dreams of managing more colonies. What would each of you say as far as how do you know if you're ready to make that move and increase your colony number?

Megan: We just put together a balance sheet for veterinarians who are starting their businesses and we actually through that dictate how big you should make your business based on what level of income you want to bring in. That would be the best version, is saying, "Okay, if I'm going to do a side business and really I want the side business to net $10,000 or to net $20,000, then how many hives do I need if I get this much pounds per hive and I sell it for this much? How many hives do I need to have to really reach the goal of what I want my business to look like?" That would be super cool. I literally don't know anybody who's done that.

I would say what I've seen what people do is that they just be like, "Oh, these bees are not dying. I finally got my mites under control." Then they just get into it a little more and so the business creeps up on them. I would say in most cases, maybe all cases, it's really a lovely journey, but unplanned. I would say the other thing for me that has dictated when I have done scales-up is when I have a capital purchase to pay off. If I have some extraction equipment or if I have a truck to pay off, then I need to have more bees because I need to make more money to support the bees. They have to pay themselves for themselves. I think it does depend if you have things you need to pay for or how much money you need to get out of your side gig.

Ana: Similar to what Meghan said, I think it was more the bees told us that we were ready for more bees in terms of colonies surviving and needing to do lots of splits, and selling some nucs but still having more splits to increase. That's been the primary way we have grown.

Becky: I'm sensing that the answer is if you're a really good beekeeper, then you might be ready to grow your operation.

Ana: Keeping colonies alive is a big part of it, and splitting colonies is a big part of it too.

Jeff: Is there a way to upscale or figure out how large you can grow based on your available time? I have so many hours available in a week that I'm not sleeping or otherwise occupied in either a day job or a second job. How many colonies, how many yards can I fit into that allotted time?

Megan: That was one of the biggest notes I had in preparation for this show, is you have to just be so much faster in your inspections. I did math, we can talk about it later, but I actually figured-- a lot of the people that are new, they spend so much time per hive. If you actually calculate out how much time you have-- wait, I'll tell you my math. I don't know if we wanted to dive into it so early in the show.

Jeff: Yes, please.

Becky: Please, it's exciting.

Megan: I know people that spend an hour per hive, but if you spent 20 minutes a hive, and you went from up to even 40 hives, that's 800 minutes for inspections, which is 13 hours.

Then you have to say, like, "Do I really have 13 hours? If I wanted to get through all my hives in one week, so everybody's on the same schedule, do I have 13 hours that I can give to that?" Obviously, if you got up to many more hives, you're talking about literally more days or more hours than are in a day or that are in a week. I would say that it really doesn't make sense to go up at all until you can get in and out of a hive really fast.

What I do is I differentiate beekeeping versus when I just miss the bees and want to go out there and fart around with some hives for a little bit. There are times when I am working, and I am going out there, and I am putting on feed buckets, and that is very, very fast. Obviously, I love beekeeping, so that's why I do it. Sometimes I go around and play around with some hives, but those are two very separate things. If I want to have a lot of hives, then I have to be able to get through them very quickly.

Jeff: It is important to be able to manage your time so much more. I often refer to myself as a time-crunched beekeeper. I cannot spend a lot of time, as much as I'd like to, like you mentioned, in all my inspections or everything. I need to get in and get out. Becky, didn't we have Randy Oliver on, and he said when he's doing quick inspections, he's like 15 seconds in a colony, he knows whether it's right and he's out of there. He doesn't spend any more time than that, and that's good.

Becky: Yes. I think that's what Meghan and Ana have said too, is that if your bees are surviving, that means that you're not digging in to figure out if you need to manage mites. You already have a mite management strategy. You're not learning as you go along. You've pretty much got it down, and you have more time. Then you want more bees, maybe.

Ana: One thing too is, if your colonies are healthy and queen right, it doesn't take very long to do an inspection. It's normally the colonies that are struggling or having issues that take a little bit longer.

Jeff: What about family permissions? That has to factor in somewhere, right? We're not talking about it yet, but it costs money, it costs time. It's going to cost somewhere. In your dealing with other beekeepers and other people expanding their operations, any advice along those lines?

Ana: In my case, my husband is a beekeeper. We were both beekeepers before we met. That's how we met. Actually, we met because Becky introduced us. I think for us, it's probably pretty different. We both came into the beekeeping operation with wanting to have it and grow it, although we did come from different beekeeping perspectives. My husband worked more in a commercial beekeeping operation, and I worked a lot with the Bee Squad, where we managed smaller apiaries. We did have different perspectives initially on managing and growing, and just different ways we approach colonies.

Overall, I think we're mostly on the same page with our beekeeping operation and trying to keep it at the same size. When we do want to grow it, we have a lot of complementary skills in that area.

Meghan: For me, my husband hates bees, is afraid of them and doesn't want to be involved at all. He does like the money that they bring in. For me, it is really a second job, and I do treat it like a second job. I run a side business as a job, and that's how it works out. We're at the place where it's nice having that extra income coming in, and it definitely does get in the way of the free time, but that's what work-- all of my jobs get in the way of my free time.

Jeff: Free time is just something to fill with work.

Becky: My joke is if I had more free time, I'd get more hives. I just would have more bees, probably.

Becky: That's not a joke. That's just darn serious. There's nothing funny about that. That's the truth.

Jeff: Considering expanding an operation, does it make a difference what your goal of your beekeeping operation is and how you expand it if you're going for honey production or if you're going for pollination or venom collection? I don't know. Whatever your goal is, does that have an impact on how you expand?

Megan: Yes, I would say for sure because two reasons. One is that you can only get so much from each hive. If you're selling nucs really, really heavily, that's going to dip into your honey production. The other thing is that you do have different customers for each, so they're basically separate businesses. One of the most useful things that I did was go through the process of doing a business model canvas, which helps you identify who your customers are and who your partners are and what pipelines you need to set up your business.

I do queens, and I also do honey, and those are two separate entities.

Obviously, I use the same hives, but they're not the same business at all. I have a completely different customer. I have a different way to reach those customers. I have different balance sheets that fit with those. They all fall under the farm or the bee business umbrella, but they are very, very different in terms of the way that you have your income stream set up.

Becky: Ana, how do you organize your bee business?

Ana: We primarily sell nucs and sell honey. I sell some beeswax candles, but that's more just a hobby, and I have one store where I sell them. Normally, we're thinking about splits and selling nucs in order to manage our growth so we're not doubling each year. Then we try to set up as many colonies as we can to really be situated so they can produce honey if we have good nectar flows.

Becky: Ana, if I'm in your apiaries, and you've got, say, 20 hives in one apiary, are all of them honey production in the summer? Then after the winter, are you splitting them for nucs and then just doing honey? Are they the same hives for the same thing?

Ana: In our operation, normally they're the same. The colonies that we will split for nucs, then we'll put into honey production. If a colony has a queen issue, that might set it back, and it might not make the same honey crop as others. Normally, after we're done with spring splits and nucs, our goal is to get most of our colonies producing honey. I guess we do sometimes make smaller units as backup units in case we want to do combines.

Becky: Basically, your extra queens are in small colonies?

Ana: Yes.

Becky: What about you, Meghan, because you're selling queens, so you have to have more of a separation? That was a question.

Megan: I do, and I learned that the hard way. I used to have everything together when I first started. Then it really, for me, makes the most sense to leave the honey-producing ones alone, let them make their honey, get huge. The other thing too, is it's nice to have all the queen-rearing things at the house because you have to check it all the time. Everything that's at the house is involved in queen rearing, and then all the outyards are involved for honey production.

Becky: Then are you evaluating your honey producers for next year's breeders?

Megan: Yes. The rigor really depends on my MSU. That's where MSU really ruins it for me. The first thing to drop will be the note-taking. The bee health is always there, but the note-taking will drop if my research takes over [crosstalk]

Becky: Is that where the rocks and sticks come in?

Megan: There's like, a piece of clover under the lid means this. There's a lot of codes that go on that are only known to me.

Jeff: I couldn't remember from one hive to another what the-- okay, this was a three-leaved clover. It's okay. Four leaf mean it's really good. If it's a blade of grass, they're a bad colony? Is that something like that?

Megan: I could take up the whole podcast talking about the weird, if the stick is this way, and the moon is in Taurus. No. In reality, I do have a number on each hive and I do have a corresponding sheet of paper, which each one it is whether or not I have time to do VSH testing or if I'm just paying attention. Sometimes it's literally like I put a heart down on the one that's my favorite and it turns out that it's my favorite every time. They're nice and they make a lot of honey and they've kept Varroa low, and that's easy to see through management. Then sometimes I'm doing more rigorous testing for them, but I do pick out the yard favorite and then that usually comes back.

Becky: Aren't there data out there maybe not published, but that when you let beekeepers rate their bees and you actually rate their bees, a lot of times the beekeepers know what they're talking about?

Megan: I believe it.

Becky: If you're a good beekeeper, it makes sense that you are able to say this is a good colony, and maybe you can't put exact words as far as why it is, but it turns out that once you put them through the test, they score well.

Jeff: Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break, and we'll be right back with Meghan Milbrath and Ana Heck.

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Becky: Welcome back, everybody. This is such a fun conversation. I want to move us to building your numbers. I know we can do it through packages and nucs, and that's going to take a financial investment, but one of the ways you can build your bees is through splits of your own colonies. I think we should just give you both space to tell us how you do it, and if you have any strong opinions, you can certainly share them here.

Megan: I'm laughing because Becky knows I have very strong opinions on this subject. I completely disagree that you buy packages or nucs to expand your operation. If you are thinking about growing your operation, it should be because you're already at the place where you're keeping your bees alive and you're keeping them big and healthy. If you have a few colonies of bees, next year you have many colonies of bees. It's just so easy to make multiple splits and be in growth mode. There's a couple of reasons that I feel so strongly about it. The first one is biosecurity. This is where my research and my beekeeping do overlap.

I actually learned a lot from the work I do at MSU that I realized I wasn't doing so great at home, and that was really improving biosecurity. We have so many diseases that are circulating, and some of them at really high levels. If you keep buying bees, there's just a matter of time before you bring in diseases in your operation, and some of them, like my one true love European foulbrood, are really, really hard to get out of your operation and almost impossible to eradicate. If you can set up a boundary around your operation and not bring in packages or nucs, the one thing is queens, there's a much lower disease risk chance for queens coming in.

One is the biosecurity. The second one is just the numbers. Like I said, I love a good balance sheet. I don't see how you can buy bees and actually make a profit, especially when you should have bees coming out of your ears if you're doing your job right. If I have 10 really, really healthy colonies, it would be no problem to get up to at least 30 by the next year, and you can more than double as long as you have the equipment to follow behind that. For me, it's just a waste of money and a disease risk, but I love packaged producers. They're nice people.

Ana: We both sell nucs.

Becky: I was going to say, and you're both selling nucs. I don't know, you are the worst advertisers ever. No, I'm kidding.

Megan: This is why I switched to honey.

Becky: Can you add on that? Because, for example, when you're splitting your colonies, are you dividing them in half or are you pulling out more than one colony from a wintered?

Ana: Here in Michigan, we often get a really strong nectar flow early in the spring. We're splitting our colonies to manage for swarming to try to deter swarming. We are first normally just taking nucs out of colonies. I think sometimes beekeepers think of it on like a one-to-one ratio, but we do mix the bees. We might take a few frames from one colony and a couple more from another depending on what each colony has to give. Sometimes it means that a colony is giving more than a nuc, so a nuc and a half maybe. We're doing our nucs and then selling our nucs. Then after that, we are still splitting just as we need to manage for swarming.

Becky: Do either of you Demaree?

Megan: I do. I love a good Demaree.

Becky: Oh, I love a Demaree.

Megan: A modified Demaree. I would say the other thing too is I do the splits in the spring and I do manage swarming. At the moment I just sell the excess nucs to keep my numbers where I need to be, but I'm not splitting heavily enough to-- I'm not splitting for the production of nucs. If I need to make numbers up or I wanted to grow, like when I moved back to the US I wanted to grow my numbers up, I'll also split again in July. Then I'll overwinter more smaller colonies because at that point it's just a numbers game from what I can come out with in the springtime.

Ana: There is also a balance between splitting a strong colony lots of times versus splitting it too much. Some beekeepers who are a little too ambitious to grow their colony numbers can split the colony so there's too many small units that have a hard time taking off or they're just so small that they get stressed.

Megan: That's a really good point. The other thing that I see when people over-split is that a lot of times if you only have brand new equipment, you are just battling swarming because you can't get the beast to draw the comb fast enough. One of the words of advice that I got, which I do feel strongly about and served me well, was never more than double each year because that also helps you keep pace with your skills so that you're not getting up to 100 hives when you're still spending five minutes per hive.

Then also that it allows the amount of drawn comb you have to grow with you.

Unless you get lucky and you have a great source of clean drawn comb, which most of us don't have, then you're really stuck with being-- if you have everybody just in foundation, it's really hard to keep the brood nest from getting clogged up and chasing swarms all the time. If you can set your business plan to allow for a very reasonable pace of growth, that's way better than being, "Oh, I can make millions at this. I'm going to just go big."

Jeff: How are you managing the growth of the queens then? Are you buying queens as you expand or are you raising your own queens? A combination of both? Walkaway splits?

Ana: We have some good relationships with some beekeepers who are in warmer climates that my husband's seen their operations and really likes it. We often do buy queens early in the spring. For us, it's easier than trying to rear our own queens early in the spring. We both also have bee jobs for Michigan State University, so the busy time for our bees and our work is often the same time. It's been easier for us to get a shipment of queens and use those for some of our splits. Later on in the season, we might do some of our own queen-rearing, but that's how we normally deal with the earliest queens that we need.

Megan: I do purchase other queens. One of my favorite things is getting queens from other people to try them out. In terms of just keeping my things going, I mostly use queen cells. Like I said, I'll pick my favorites from the years before, bring them back, graft off of them and we'll do queen cells into whatever splits that I want to do.

Jeff: Are either of you raising specific drone yards or are you working them with the drones as well? Or is it you just let the natural mating, whatever happens, happens?

Megan: I would say for me, in between that a little bit. All my outyards are honey production yards, so I do let them get big. Those are the hives that they're getting big, so they are producing drones. I use just regular foundation, I don't use plastic, so there's a lot of drone comb that naturally gets made in there. I don't emphasize putting in green frames or something like that, but I have many large hives with drones. Then I do keep them close to the house. Part of it is because of having drones close to my mating yards, and part of it is because my F350 gets nine miles to a gallon, so I can't really afford to drive too much farther.

Ana: For us, when we raise queens in the summer, we haven't had to do anything specifically with having drone yards. Our queens seem to be getting mated just fine with the bees in our area.

Jeff: What about buying an operation? Is that a good way to expand? That's a quick way to expand, I guess, if you have that capital and opportunity.

Becky: Does Meghan look mad right now?

Megan: No, I'm not mad. I think the only situation that I would recommend buying an operation is if you've already been working for it already. The nicest, true mentorship scenarios are when you get to work for someone for a while and as a work trade get things out of their operation. I did get quite a few bees from a local beekeeper who I was helping him with queen rearing and lifting stuff, and he was mentoring me, and then I got bees from him. I knew exactly what they were. I'd been in them a lot, I knew how he kept for them. I think there is that scenario, otherwise, the two risks, one is, obviously, the biosecurity risk.

You'd really want to know what the scenario is and what the bees look like that you're getting. The other thing is just that growth. If you have a situation where you were out of bees for a while, but you have that skill and you can do it quickly, that's very different from, "Man, it was awesome to have four hives. Now I want to have 40," or 100, which we do see.

In that case, it's really, really hard to keep up. If you already know that you have the speed, the skills, and all the other accessory equipment and you know that the bees are safe in terms of disease, that could be fine.

Jeff: Ana and Meghan, if you would be happy to join us next week for our next episode in this series of upscaling the operation we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the equipment and how do you manage that and plan for that. Thank you for joining us this week, and we'll be back next week with Ana Heck and Meghan Milbrath.

That wraps it up for this episode. Before we go I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast or wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews tab along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank Betterbee and our regular longtime sponsors, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you the Beekeeping Today Podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments on our website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

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