Why Keep Bees?
The stock answer for why to keep bees is because bees make honey, and fresh, raw honey tastes much better than what passes for honey in the supermarket.
How much honey you get depends tremendously on the weather and the state of your bees when big honey plants are in blossom. In ballpark figures, it’s entirely reasonable to expect 40-60 lbs. of surplus honey from an established hive in its second year.
You may get more.
Some exceptional locations can regularly produce over 200 lbs. from a single hive in one year. I’ve occasionally gotten twenty or thirty pounds of honey from hives in their first year, though this is unusual…
