hello Finsky! I owe you a couple! :-D. So far, the figures for the total harvest of honey per colony per year (i.e. the totality of the honey that is produced by the bees before the beek take his part) that I came across varied between 187kg and 300kg and there are some accounts of beekeepers in America that at the beginning of 1900, before pesticides and today's agriculture, were reporting harvests of 100kg! Even for just 187kg is profitable to smartly insulate the hive and save around 20kg of honey for the bees(!) so that they can eat honey and build their combs. What is really profitable for the beekeeper,..and his sons or daughters! and so on..,and human society! is to work with bees that don't get ill and are attuned to their environment; I am afraid that with the shameful economics used to justify the world order today these benefits cannot be quantified and society will not be able, any time soon, to remunerate any beekeeper whose hives contribute to impollinate, free of charge, 80% of the horticultural products of the world, in the U.S alone estimated in 2003 to be worth between 18 and 27 billion $.-from The Xerces Society- And don't expect any time soon, that "AgroPharma" pays the beekeepers for their losses or society for the extermination of the wild pollinators, without which there is not horticulture. These costs are not paid at the tiller,or even better by taxing the manufacturer, but by all of us, our bees and our children. In this jungle society the profit of one are the losses of someone else or nature, now or after that. If we used this forums to organise mass plantings of melliferous flora, involve schools, jails, elderly houses... if we used facebook or else to promote it for roadway hedges,city and natural parks, ditches, ravines ..and to campain for a tax on pesticides, maybe the difference in honey harvested by a stationary hive and a nomadic one, like back in the 1900, would not be so different, or nomadism would not be worth that much: especially if a beek was paid for the already mentioned ecosystem services that his bees provide and he had to pay to move his stock, since in so doing he has been accused, in numerous occasion, of dehabilitating the bees,i.e to deplete the natural capital, the bees, on which the welfare of all present and future beekeepers, as well as our beloved insects, depend... Even then efficient insulation of the hive would matter a lot, especially for the health of the bees.