My Fifty Year Part Time Job

My first salaried, actually hourly, job was at the Dairy Queen where I made .75 an hour.  In the day that was  not all that bad.  Adults were making $2.75.  A year or two before that I started a hobby which has always been a small business.  Somewhere I have my first year's record of beekeeping written in my now strange looking 14 year old handwriting.  I distinctly remember harvesting 30 pounds of honey from my hive the first year.  Minnesota ranks high on the list of honey producing states and in good years 100+ pounds of surplus hone could be expected.  That would be surplus in excess of what you need to leave on the hive for the colony to consume through the winter.  

Beekeeping  is much the same as it has been for the last 100 years but there are also big industry changes.  Commercial beekeepers rarely winter their bees in MN but send them off to OK or TX where they can forage enough to survive in the mild winters.  Winter losses in MN  used to be moderate (~10-20%) but with influx of mites over the past 20 years and the complex colony collapse syndrome over the past seven or eight years  winter losses can exceed 50% and summer losses will also occur.  Wintering a colony also leaves 150 pounds of honey per hive unavailable for harvesting and human consumption.  That cost alone warrants moving colonies to the south.

During the winter bees do not hibernate but move into an elliptical cluster about the size of a football with the queen at the center where is remains about 60 degrees.  The bees rotate position slowly sharing the time at the outside of the cluster consuming about five pounds of honey per month.  

These are not my hives but show a healthy wintering hive on the left, one in trouble and dying in the middle and the one on the right is dead.

My colony count has ranged from one to thirty colonies.  Thirty is too many.  It's a challenging enough hobby (business) that the more colonies you have the more you lose.  Normally I make a little money.  When my kids were little I sold it as "college fund honey."  Certainly products like "raw" honey, single source honey and stranger products like pollen and propolis are profitable but labor intensive.

Each year for the past five I've said in the fall that it was my last year.  A thermal camera would my diminishing energy.  I would have enjoyed a career in entomology.