The Price Of Honey Bees

Most first year beekeepers value honey bees at way to high of a price. Reason for this is they have just ordered their first hive of bees and know what the breeder charged them, but any beekeeper here in the south that has been doing it for a while knows that bees are much cheaper to get than ordering packages. Now we still have to order them every once in a while, but if you have a good strong bee yard bees only cost you feed, time, and the cost of queen. So thirty bucks for a new hive and the time it takes for them to build up. Time is what most new beekeepers and true hobby beekeepers value its not the bees. 

The Value I Give to Removal Bees

    Right now lets say I wanted a new hive it would cost me 20 bucks. I would order a queen from kelley bees then pull 3 frames out of a hive I have right now and TA-DA new hive. I just would need to add sugar water to help them get started and next year I would have 2 hives where I had one. So with that said what value do I give the bees in your wall none. I would like to have the bees because I like bees and can never have enough, but truthfully they have no real value I can get new hive so many cheaper ways than doing removals. I could buy a commercial production hive from one of the big guys for about 200 then split it into at least 4 nucs in one year so that's 50 bucks a hive and I do no work. I could put out swarm traps they cost me about 3 dollars a piece and give about 50% return in swarms in spring so that is a cost of 6 dollars a hive. Adkins Bee Removal has a plan where I could send them the boxes for the hives and they would send them back full of bees cost would just be gas money and I would get at least 20 hives at a time. The only beekeepers that will do removals and give the bees any value are the new keepers they have yet to learn the true cost of bees and that is just time.

Always remember Americanized bees are out there so your bees could be the first hive found in Mississippi. They have been found in both Louisiana and Arkansas. They have been found a lot further north than Mississippi.