I offer as much service as you would like for hive management. For some customers, I do everything--from initial setup, to monthly management, and harvesting and extracting their honey. Depending on how involved you plan to be, you can join me for up to 3 mentoring sessions, or you can kick back and let me handle everything.

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Hive Management Pricing

There is no contract for me to manage your own hives and it is month-by-month. I always try to lump customers in together so they split the travel charge. If you shop around, you will see that my prices are very reasonable. I haven't raised my prices since starting the business.

Management of 1-4 Hives	$75
5-12 Hives	$100
Each Hive over 12	Add $10
Over 15 miles from Buda, Texas	Add $30
Honey Harvest/Extraction	$45

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Materials

I only use organic treatments like oxalic acid and Thymol. I carry extra frames and 8-frame boxes, and sell them at a slight mark-up to cover the cost of paint, glue, crown staples, and a little of my time assembling them. I don't think anyone is going to beat my prices. I always verify with the customer before any expenses are added.

1:1 Sugar/Water Syrup	$6
2:1 Sugar/Water Syrup	$11
Pollen Patty	$5
Oxalic Acid Vapor Treatment	$5
Apiguard Tray	$10

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What is the cheapest way to get your ag exemption for your property?

Let’s just be real here. The county is looking for a 5-year beekeeping history on your property. You don’t have to meet their threshold/hive count until the end of year 5. So what exactly does that mean?

If you need to have say, 10 hives on your property to meet the threshold the county requires, you do not need to have all 10 in year 1. I recommend starting with 2 hives and managing them yourself. From there, just purchase 1 nuc every year, and keep your receipts. If you get very lucky and do a good job, by the time the end of year 5 comes, you should be at 6 hives. From there you can purchase or lease 4 more nucs in your last year before getting the inspector out there to get your exemption certified.

Remember, you’re going to want a buffer. Bees are free to do what they want, and they can abscond at any time. Things happen all the time with bees. Losses are commonly 20% in tough areas, even if you do a good job with them. So you will want at minimum a 20% buffer, in my opinion.

I would never advocate just purchasing a nuc every year and not caring for them. 5 years is a lot of time to learn about beekeeping. Take a class, and read a couple of beekeeping books. By the end of year 5, if you take care of the bees yourself, you will be a somewhat seasoned beekeeper yourself. If you aren’t interested in hiring someone like me to come out and manage your bees for you, you can always have me out just for a few mentoring sessions. I offer 3 mentoring sessions with no extra charge from my regular hive management prices. So you can join me! But I am not interested in mentoring customers for more than 3 sessions. The reason I say this is because I have had some customers who I have mentored something like 18 times, and they still don’t feel comfortable even feeding their bees themselves. At some point, you just need to jump into it and get over the fear of hurting the bees. You can just call me if you have questions. The customers I am looking for doing longterm hive management are those who know for a fact that they don’t have time to do it themselves.

I have to lump my customers in together and separate work by areas. If the customer needs to join me every time, it makes scheduling almost impossible. I need to be able to get to that bee yard on the day I am in that area, and take care of the bees without tons of correspondence. This is one of the reasons I am moving more towards hive leasing over managing other peoples’ bees. That way they’re my bees, I make the splits, I will share the honey if there is any, all of the expenses that go into the bees are mine only and I don’t have to do any persuading to get people to agree to the expense, etc. My job is to have a certain number of hives on the property, and that is my portion of the transaction.