When I 1st was going to start with beekeeping I was planing on starting out slowly with 2 or 3 hives. However as I have mentioned before I now have 12 hives - 2 bought from a beek from the club and 10 from the widow of an old beek who died suddenly. This was in August last year (2013).
1 of the 10 didn't make it through the winter but I made up for that loss easily by splitting one of the other hives. 2 of my hives have swarmed and I lost those swarms as I was not prepared for them. I had one of my hives do 'boomerang' swarm so I quickly put out 2 swarm traps. Yesterday I noticed a lot of activity around the 1 swarm trap. Then I looked closer at the 2nd trap and there were loads of bees around that one to so it looks like I have caught 2 swarms! Now my step father wants to go and buy 10 more empty hives for me so I can expend my apiary even more rapidly than I was expecting!
Should I get some nuc boxes and try over wintering them so I can sell them next year? I'm trying to prove to my step father that I can make a profitable business of the bees and not just from the honey but from the bees themselves - Nucs, queen breeding, pollen and propolis.