If you are a beekeeper that is struggling to make decent money from your apiary, I have the article for you. A lot of beekeepers get stuck trying the same old things when it comes to making money out of their bees. Be original! Try something unique and dodge the crowd! This is how you can stand out and make the money that a lot of your peers are struggling to!
Disclaimer: before we kick off, I want to start with a quick disclaimer. Beekeeping is not a get rich quick scheme! It takes a lot of effort and dedication to make decent money. These tips will help you make the money you need to go full time, but you won’t be a millionaire anytime soon. Sorry yo burst your bubble 🙂
I do have another article talking about how to profit from beekeeping. You might want to check out that article too. However, this one is more focused on finding unique ways to make money from your beehives. If that’s what you’re after read on…
5 Beekeeping Money Hacks
1- Honey Sticks!
Many beekeepers always think they have to sell their honey in big vats for prices that hark back to many decades ago! If it isn’t this, it is probably just selling their honey in bog standard glass jars! Don’t get me wrong, you can make money this way as a beekeeper. However, if you want to improve your margins and get into something more lucrative, you need to think outside the box.
Do you know about honey sticks? (sometimes known as honey straws). These long and thin sleeves of honey have become a trend in recent years. And they are a great way to repackage your honey with much higher margins. For example, look at the two options below found over at Amazon (click the image to view them there yourself). The cost per ounce for the honey sticks is almost three times what the price of the gourmet honey in a squeezy tube! That makes a massive difference!
Whether you sell them yourself online or get them stocked in your local supermarket, honey sticks or honey straws are a great way to maximize your earnings.
2- Branding
In order to make more money from your apiary you need to think about the branding. A modern and unique brand for your honey will help you sell more and sell for prices which are much higher than just slapping a cheap label on a glass jar of it! And the best part is that in this digital age, it is not that hard to make such a brand.
It used to cost thousands and thousands to get an advertising agency to come up with high-quality branding, but with the advent of online agencies and freelancers, it is significantly cheaper to get this done these days.
For example, if you click the image below, you will be taken to a freelancer site called Fiverr, where you can find people that would make you high-quality logos and branding for hundreds rather than thousands of dollars!!
3- Personalised Gifts
Rather than selling your honey in bulk, you can make more money (as talked above with honey sticks) by selling your honey in smaller containers. But these containers need to have a unique selling point or a novelty value.
A prime example of this would be to take the small jars with labels found over at Amazon (again click the image to go look at them over there yourself) and fill them with honey that can be given away as a gift to guests at a wedding. You know those small gifts that people like to leave on tables at weddings!
You could even provide a service that provides small jars of honey as wedding gifts. The bride and groom’s name could be engraved on the small jar. With some finishing touches, you could get an excellent mark up on such a product. And if it too hard to have a glass jar engraved, you could try just putting a personalised label on it instead.
Think outside the box, put a little effort in, and you could use all kinds of personalized gift ideas to greatly improve the markup on your honey.
4- Do One Thing Well!
A lot of beekeepers end up trying to sell everything they get from bees and end up being the Jack of all trades and master of none. They hear you can earn money from beeswax, from honey, from selling bee packages…. I could go on! And they decide to try them all!
Try to decide on one good way to earn money with your bees and stick to that only. This will allow you to really refine your service and be one of the best providers around. High quality will be your middle name and you will have punters literally lining up to get your products or try out your services.
5- The Honey Advent Calendar
You have advent calendars for everything these days. It’s crazy! It started with chocolate advent calendars, which let you eat a small chocolate each time you opened one of the calendar’s doors! They now have the same for beers, whiskeys and even herbal teas! Why not come up with a honey based advent calendar. Each day, get another dose of amazing tasting honey. The downside is you can only sell these one time a year, but the upside is this is a unique idea that could really help your apiary business along! The only challenge would be to come up with a different flavor or variety of honey for each day.
