This page was last updated
18 February 2012
Quest for the Good Life Welcome to our set up and costs section.
We started bee keeping this year (2011) with just the one national hive, but later added another colony in a nuc box.
The first hive is a National, one of the popular hives in the UK. To us the type of hive didn’t matter but a beekeeper suggested sticking to the same type so you can use common parts and try to keep costs down.
For anyone thinking of starting out, lets look at some basic initial outlays.
The hive we purchased was an “economy” National hive from Thornes via their Ebay stores. This was £150 for a full hive with brood box, 2 supers, varroa floor and roof.
This kit included a plastic queen excluder and crown board with 2 porter bee escapes. It also supplied all of the frames for the two supers and brood box along with the beeswax foundation.
Now the quality of the wood may be a little rough but for that price I think you get a good deal. We don’t like plastic Queen excluders so we always knew we would replace that and also introduce a glass quilt too ( a sort of glass lid)
So £150 for the hive, £17 for the glass quilt and the same for a wire Queen excluder (framed).
Any new colony of bees needs feeding to get it established so a rapid feeder was also purchased (about £5.50).
So overall to buy the basic structure of this National Hive cost around £190.00
The stand you see the hive on was made buy myself out of tile lathe and cost no more than £1 or £2 (including the landing board).
There are many other deals on hives on sites such as Ebay, but many do not include frames and so you have to factor their costs into the overall price.
But so far we have spent about £190.
You must have protection, so a cheap all in one bee suit on ebay will cost about £35. You can pay a lot more than this and you might get a better quality one, but to start with cheap is perhaps the best option. Gloves will costs you about £10
You will need a hive tool and smoker as the basic kit. The smoker is to generate puffs of smoke to control the bees, but in reality many times you do not use it, but it’s handy to have by your side. These can cost around £30 and above. The hive tool is very important and allows you to lift sticky frames and prize apart bee glued wood. About £10.
So that’s £35 for the suit + £10 gloves, £30 for the smoker and £10 for the hive tool. Another £85 making a total of £275. But of course these things can be used again so are a one off purchase only.
Nearly forgot the bees! You can buy bees in what’s called a nucleus. This means a small collection of frames with a laying queen, some brood and stores. A sort of mini hive which will grow into a full sized colony in it’s first year.
One of the popular strains of honey bees are the Buckfast. You can read more on the net about the work of Brother Adam at Buckfast Abbey.
These bees seems quite calm most of the time and get on with it. As new bee keepers, you do hear some stories of bees being a bit defensive, but we have found these to be easy to handle. Not to say they won’t sting you, they will, but not as often as some other types.
So a nucleus of bees will cost anything from £150 to £220. This is your biggest investment, not just in money, but in the very life force of the hive.
So I think we are now up to about £425 and remember this is done as economically as possible.
Now a single colony is a great starting point. We had this for a couple of months. There are however disadvantages to this. We had problems with the queen in our new colony. Either she got damaged in transit or we rolled here on our first inspection. Whatever happened, she never became established in the hive. Laying stopped, the bees wanted to raise a new queen and in the mean time the numbers dwindled. It took a while to sort the problem out, but we did suffer from a lack of brood to keep hatching. This was a “ding” moment for us. We realised that if we did not keep the queen laying your colony will reduce in size to a point when the new brood stops. Once that happens you are doomed. Our answer was to take a frame of brood from another bee keeper to keep the cycle going, but left to it’s own devices, that hive would have died out.
We realised that having another colony would be very beneficial. You can take frames of eggs and young from one and put it in the other. So we purchased a Nuc box ( a small version of a hive) and another nucleus of bees (Yes, another £150). You may not want to do this initially, especially if your queen settles in well, but it does act as an insurance policy because if your first colony fails you’ll have to buy more anyway.
So excluding a second colony you are looking at between £400 and £500 to start up a colony.
This is not meant to be off putting, more realistic I suppose. Once you are rolling, you can use bee keeping techniques to split hives and raise Queens to generate your own bees, so those costs become less with time. As with all things, it’s getting off the ground that hurts the most!
Here’s an alternative to the more conventional hive. This one’s called a Top Bar Hive and it does it very differently.
This top bar hive can be made by you if you have basic wood working abilities. This one pictured above is not completed yet, it needs a roof still. This only took 2 days to get to this stage and so far has cost less than £50 and that’s using good timber.
It may be worth considering if you want to keep bees on a more economical scale.
You have very little by way of frames and conventional hive equipment. The bees make their own comb below bars of wood (hence the name top bar hive) and they pretty much do it all themselves.
They are not as honey productive as frame hives but that’s not everything (unless you want to be a commercial bee keeper of course).
Find out more and download some plans from www.biobees.com or use the link in our downloads section.