Advanced Beekeeping 301
Introduction: The Commercial Beekeeper
This course is arranged by topics rather than lessons. You can skip topics or you can study each topic. You may study them in any order that is of interest to you. Our first topic is the Commercial beekeeper.
The Commercial beekeeper
The purpose of an advanced beekeeping class is to acquaint beekeepers with the skills developed by commercial beekeepers who make a living at beekeeping. To many hobby beekeepers, making money is not the issue! The issue is to be a better beekeeper. However, commercial beekeepers must become better beekeepers to succeed at a livelihood in beekeeping. The number of commercial beekeepers has declined steadily in the past 50 years. The reason for this is pure and simple -- economics.
A person must consider labor saving equipment and methods if becoming a commercial beekeeper today. The person must be well grounded in understanding what the priorities are in beekeeping. The person must understand "beekeeping." You can benefit from some of the tricks of the trade they use.
Beekeeping to the commercial beekeeper may not be beekeeping to the hobbyist. What I mean by this is: " a hobbyist may worry about the color of a hive, or where to put bees. Do I use queen excluders or not? What should I use for a bottom board (Screened or unscreened?), Should I buy ventilated covers? When is it time to requeen? When can I take off my honey crop? Should I make a split or how do I make a split? The list could go on and on.
Major difference between the hobbyist and the Commercial beekeeper.
A commercial beekeeper worries about the bottom line (Am I going to make money from the bees?) In order to make money, the commercial beekeeper already knows that splits have to made up in the spring to replace any colonies that died out over the winter. The commercial beekeeper must know where to put bees! When to take off the honey crop! When to use queen excluders! And what about equipment? Some don't even paint their equipment, some paint the hives any color they can get in large quantity for low price, but one thing they do. They standardize everything.
Bottom boards are replaced with pallets that can be picked up and loaded
with a mechanical loader such as a skid steer, or
"Swinger". 
All hives are the same height so pallets of bee hives can be stacked one on top of another
when being moved. All honey supers
are of the same size.
Moving
Bees
Here a commercial beekeeper is moving hives for pollination. The sun is going down. This truck is moving 120 hives. Note the Skid steer loader is being pulled on a trailer behind the truck. The bees are loaded late in the afternoon and moved to a new location during late evening and night hours.
Management of bees is specialized into categories such as queen rearing, package bee production, pollination, honey production or a combination of these.
Standardize all equipment
For the advanced beekeeper it is important to have all equipment meet some standard. If you are a hobbyist, you can standardize all hive bodies, honey supers, top cover lids, and bottom boards. I know of a number of beekeepers who have all medium (Illinois) supers. They use them for brood supers as well as honey supers. The advantage is they have only one size of frame to deal with and everything can be lifted easily. For the commercial beekeeper, it may be all deeps. They will use deeps for brood chambers and honey supers. Of course, the handling of full honey supers will require the use of heavy equipment. Again there is an advantage of using deep supers. Less expense in equipment and labor. Keep in mind that it takes more supers if you are using medium or shallow supers rather than deeps. More frames means more extracting time and more construction time. Each box must be handled and if fewer boxes are handled, then time is saved.
Pallets
Usually, what bee hives sit on -- sets the hobbyist apart from the commercial beekeeper. Not all but most commercial beekeepers will keep bees on pallets. The reason for this: Commercial beekeepers move hives several to many times during the bee season.
This
is a photo of Billy Engle of The Rock, Georgia moving bees into a Sourwood
area of northern Georgia. This is a 16 foot trailer, two hives per pallet
handled with a hand truck. Notice the load is covered with a bee net. A
bee net is used when hauling a load of bees during day light hours. Some states
require a bee net to be used at all times because bees are considered a hazardous
cargo.
Bees on pallets can be handled easily. Pallets have solid bottoms and have something called "hive clips" to hold the hive bodies to the pallet. The pallet is the bottom board. Usually four hives are placed to a pallet, but some beekeepers use pallets that will hold two hives. An entire truck load of 250 to 500 hives can be loaded in an hours or so with a skid steer or 32 hives can be loaded on a trailer in about the same time with a hand truck. Telescoping covers are not used. A commercial beekeeper is not worried about how far apart hives should be kept. His hives almost touch one another on the pallet. Because the commercial beekeeper is using heavy equipment, the bee yards themselves must be fairly level or flat.
Should you be in a position to increase the number of hives you manage, you must consider putting your bees on pallets. We are going to present three options to you.
1) For the person with little capital to invest in large equipment: a two hive pallet will work. All that is needed is a special hand truck to move the pallets about and a trailer.
2) With a little more capital, a person can purchase trailers for permanent placement of hives of bees. The trailers are really moveable beeyards on wheels.
3) The four hive pallet requires a fork lift to move it around as shown above.
Putting hives on trailers
For the beekeeper
who doesn't have long drives or many hives to move, the trailer option is
great. First, one can add trailers as pollination contracts
increase.
Sizes of
trailers 
can also be designed for specific types of grower needs.
This still requires an investment in trailers and something to pull them with.
This is a homemade trailer with 10 hives placed on pickles.
Old house trailer frames can be easily converted into bee hauling trailers as is shown to the right. It has a sturdy frame and can haul up to 40 hives.
The photo to the left shows such a trailer on a field of clover. Placing
bees in such a location, allows the farmer to get a good seed set and the
beekeeper gets a very good honey crop. Here we have 30 hives on a
trailer in over 200 acres of clover.
We
are going to share a few photos of a small commercial operation.
These were taken at the White Star Honey Farms. They own over 2,000
colonies of bees, have four trucks, two skid loaders, and a multitude of
buildings and equipment.
These pictures give you just a little idea of the work commercial beekeepers are involved in: moving of hives to pollination, the storage of full honey supers , the extracting machinery, and how dry and fine the wax cappings are when they are spun dry. If you are considering beekeeping as a career, visit a commercial beekeeper before jumping into this profession. As Billy Engle once told me, "Many people get into beekeeping but it is like jumping out of an airplane with a parachute. They think everything is okay until they look down and see an anvil tied to their ankle." In order to make $20,000 dollars a year with 2000 hives of bees, a beekeeper needs to make at least $10.00 per hive after all after expenses. Expenses for an operation like White Star includes such things as labor, (one full time person and three part time people); insurance for trucks, equipment, and buildings, license fees, usually a tanker load of corn syrup a year, repair cost, new equipment and replacement equipment, road usage fees and gasoline, and a multitude of other expenses that must be taken care of. Mr. Grant who owns this operation thinks that when the final figures are in for the bee year, he makes just as much money as a cab driver. However, he is his own boss.