How Much Does It Cost To Start Beekeeping? – Price Breakdown

Upfront Costs to Start Beekeeping

When you first get into beekeeping, there are a number of upfront costs every hobby apiarist will have. These include the following:

• Beehives (brood chambers and supers): ~$200 per hive
• A bee suit: $100
• Beekeeping equipment set: $75-$100
• Nucleus colony of bees: $150-$200/hive

These costs, which are common amongst all beekepers, mean that each hive, on its own, will cost about $500 just to get started, plus another $100 or so for necessary equipment that can be used across all hives on day one.

So if you want to get started with one hive, you're likely going to spend over $500. If you want to start with two, as is always recommended as a minimum (you can read more about why you need two beehives here), you're likely to easily break $1,000. Three or four hives may push that figure up to $2,000 or more rather quickly.

Of course, these costs are just the start. Do you need to construct a flyway barrier? Build a level platform? Put up an electric fence to stop bears? These are additional costs that some beekeepers may have just to get started. 

But even just showing the above costs isn't really painting the full picture, as you'll need even more equipment when it comes time to harvest, including:

• Honey jars: ~$50/hive
• Food-grade buckets: $50 for a stack
• An extractor (optional- better for those with many beehives): $200+

But we can go further!

The above are all costs you need to cover to buy equipment, either upfront or at the time of your first harvests, to enjoy beekeeping. But there are also a number of consumables that you may want to purchase over time, including:

• Sugar and pollen patties for feeding the hive: $20/hive/year
• Replacing equipment that wears down: $20/hive/year
• Mite treatments, hive beetle traps, etc.: $20/hive/year
• Replacing a queen: $40/year at one queen per year
• Replacing a failed colony with a new nucleus colony: $150-$200/year at one per year
• …and more.

As you can see, after all of your upfront costs, it isn't a stretch to spend $100, $200, $300 or more per year in upkeep just to keep your hives alive, and you may even have to replace hive boxes after a sufficient period of time as they tend to wear down and break, too.

Although, we will be the first to admit that the bulk of these costs revolve around fixing/restoring failed hives, so it really is a your-mileage-will-vary sort of experience here. The better you are at hive management and the more hives you have, the less (or in some cases, more) these costs could be, and that's all there really is to it.

Average Cost of Beekeeping Breakdown

As you can tell from the above, there are a lot of expenses that go into beekeeping, and some may have significantly higher expenses than others- especially if you need to build out a more secure apiary for things like bear protection or flyway barriers.

Your upfront costs to get started beekeeping are, most likely, $500 per hive at a minimum, and annual recurring expenses can be anywhere from $100-$300+/year for a nominal number of hives depending on how successful you are at overwintering and treating for mites.

Since you will likely want to start with a minimum of two beehives, this means that, to start, you are looking at roughly $1,000 in upfront costs and then nominal annual expenses outside of adding more hives (which, again, would be another $300-$500 a pop depending on whether you're buying bees or doing splits).

Is that cost worth it to you to have what is, for many, an excess of honey for personal consumption? Well, financially, we can see how the answer may be no. But if you're looking at these figures and still not daunted, hey, maybe beekeeping is okay with that hundred-dollar bill being on fire after all!