In Business with Bees: How to Expand, Sell, and Market Honeybee Products and Services Including Pollination, Bees and Queens, Beeswax, Honey, and More

Growing Your Operation

Richard Taylor was a noted philosopher, commercial beekeeper, an author of several best-selling beekeeping books, and a columnist for beekeeping magazines for decades. As a child, he lived through the Great Depression and, despite his frugal youth, went on to an exceptional academic life.

Because of his background, education, and beekeeping experiences, Richard professed a different philosophy when it came to time, money, and his beekeeping business: 'Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.' This mantra was given to him by a strict mother in lean times. In his opinion, this philosophy was a major factor in his beekeeping success.

This concept is not original to Richard, but it reflects a more traditional view of trading time for money: The more time you need to invest in your business, the less money you will have to spend to be successful.

If time is not a luxury (and many jobs’ schedules allow this), trading in much more time and spending much less money is a perfectly good plan. Knowing the value of the time you have is a gift. Use it wisely.

Up to now I suspect you have traded time for money. You must know the value of your time: what you could be doing instead of building frames, uncapping by hand, or lifting every super several times.

If what you would rather be doing is watching TV, then read no further because you don’t need what’s offered here. But if using that time to raise better queens, sell your honey at an exclusive farm market, negotiate a lease to plant a couple hundred acres of clover, or make up nucs from colonies running over with bees seems like a better investment in your business and your future, then read on.

Pictured: An uncapper of this capacity needs to have an accompanying extractor and other equipment that can handle this volume of frames and cappings wax so that the flow is uninterrupted and there are no bottlenecks. To do that, you need to know the number of frames it can handle in a given period of time and the amount of cappings wax and honey that you’ll generate.