Beekeeping Cost Calculator: First-Year Costs and Honey

Mississippi State's one-hive budget adds up to $1,070.33 at October 2025 prices: $569.02 of equipment and $501.31 of bees, supplies and other costs. Missouri's two-hive budget comes to $2,205.00. First-year honey starts at 0 lb, as the sources expect little in year one.

Reference tables

USDA NASS 2025 honey yield per colony, by state (operations with at least 5 colonies that meet USDA's definition of a farm). A benchmark for established colonies, not a first-year forecast. The yields are NASS's 2025 survey. The calculator's default honey price, $12.00 a pound, is not: it is Missouri G692's planning price for honey sold in 1-pound bottles. NASS puts the 2025 United States average at $3.05 a pound — $2.45 through co-ops and private sales, $7.15 retail. Set the price to what your own honey would sell for.

State	Pounds per colony, 2025
California	35
Florida	32
Georgia	32
Idaho	29
Iowa	62
Louisiana	53
Michigan	42
Minnesota	50
Mississippi	89
Montana	85
New York	56
North Carolina	42
North Dakota	67
Ohio	45
Oregon	27
Pennsylvania	57
South Dakota	40
Texas	30
Washington	31
Wisconsin	30
Other States	49
United States	48.0

Start from a published extension budget, then change it. Two presets are built in, one from Mississippi State University Extension and one from University of Missouri Extension. The calculator adds up the lines you tick, multiplies the per-hive ones by the number of hives, and splits the answer into one-time equipment and first-year running costs. Each preset line carries the month its price came from; edit a price and that line shows as yours instead. Add lines, remove lines, and set the hive count to whatever you are planning. Nothing you type is sent to a server: the budget stays in this browser.

Worked example: Mississippi State's one-hive budget

This example is the calculator's default: P4136, the Mississippi State establishment budget for a single hive, at October 2025 prices. Ticked as published it comes to $1,070.33 — $569.02 of one-time equipment and $501.31 of bees, supplies and other first-year costs.

That is a cent under the $1,070.34 printed at the foot of P4136's Table 1, and the cent sits in the hive accessories. The six accessory lines (inner cover, telescoping outer cover, screened bottom board, entrance reducer, internal feeder and mite count board) add up to $199.20, while the accessories subtotal in the table reads $199.21. This calculator adds line items and shows what they make, so it reports $1,070.33 and never the printed figure.

P4136 prices honey harvesting equipment apart from that budget, in a second table totalling $324.98. Those six lines are in the preset but unticked, since they are outside the establishment total and the publication expects little harvesting in year one. Tick them all and the figure becomes $1,395.31.

Worked example: Missouri's two hives

The second preset is G692, the Missouri planning budget, priced a couple of months later: "Table 1 presents estimates based on prices in December 2025." It is written around a pair of colonies — "Establishment reflects the first year of beekeeping with two hives." — so the preset opens at two hives.

Ticked as published, the tool adds G692's Table 3 capital investments to $1,641.00, the figure that table prints, and the cash lines of its Table 1 to $564.00, which is the tool's own sum rather than a figure Missouri prints. Together that is $2,205.00 for a first year. Missouri's own figures are larger, and they are dollars a hive: $684 of operating costs, which counts labor and operating interest, and $841 altogether, which adds depreciation, interest on capital investments and farm business overhead. The tool's comparable figure is $282.00 a hive, which is that $684 less the labor and operating-interest lines. They start unticked, because a budget of cash you actually pay out doesn't carry them; tick them to see what they add.

Each preset follows the table it came from, so the equipment-versus-first-year split is not comparable across the two. A queen excluder, for instance, is a supply need in Mississippi's budget and a capital investment in Missouri's.

Per hive or once

Which lines multiply by the hive count is this site's grouping, not either publication's, and the tool says so above the table. Gear that serves a whole apiary — suit, smoker, hive tool, bee brush — is counted once. Boxes, frames, covers, bees and feed are counted for every hive. P4136 is the warrant for splitting them at all: "Beekeepers who set up additional hives would have some cost savings per hive since some equipment can be used across multiple hives."

Switch Missouri's preset to one hive and only the per-hive lines halve. The total drops to $1,284.00, well above half of $2,205.00, because the shared gear is still bought once. That is the arithmetic behind the saving P4136 describes, run backwards.

Honey in the first year

First-year honey starts at 0 lb, and three sources are why. P4136 says "With only one hive, significant honey harvesting is unlikely to occur in the first year". Mississippi State's beekeeping calendar, P4053, puts it in terms of what the bees do with the nectar: "New colonies are not expected to produce much harvestable honey during the first spring season because a lot of the nectar is used for building combs." The UC Davis backyard timeline for California lists, against a new package, "Unlikely to extract honey from a package".

Put a number in if you want to price a harvest anyway. The result is your figure multiplied by your price, and none of the sources above forecasts it.

The NASS benchmark

Under the calculator is USDA NASS's 2025 yield per colony by state, from the Honey release of March 13, 2026. Choose a state and the tool shows that yield for your hive count, with what it would be worth at the price you set. For the country as a whole: "Yield per colony averaged 48.0 pounds, down 7 percent from 2024."

Read that as a benchmark, not a forecast. The survey covers "operations with at least 5 honey bee colonies that also meet USDA's definition of a farm", which describes commercial and sideline outfits running established colonies rather than one new hive.

The price the field starts at, $12.00 a pound, is not a NASS figure either. It is the honey price in Missouri's assumptions table, for honey sold in 1-pound bottles, sitting beside a yield of 60 lb a hive; both are planning figures for a budget. What NASS measured is lower: "United States honey prices increased 27 percent during 2025 to $3.05 per pound, compared to $2.41 per pound in 2024." NASS reports the channels behind that average separately — honey sold through cooperatives and private channels at $2.45 a pound, retail honey at $7.15 — and says of the average itself: "United States and State level prices reflect the portions of honey sold through cooperatives, private, and retail channels." Change the field to whatever your own jars would fetch.

Prices go stale

Every preset line shows the month behind its price — October 2025 for Mississippi State, December 2025 for Missouri — and loses that date as soon as you type a price of your own. Both budgets are checked here once a year, next in September 2027. The NASS release saved behind the table is dated March 13, 2026, and is due to be checked against a newer one around March 2027. Every line is editable, so a price you have been quoted can replace a published one, and that line then shows as yours rather than carrying a month.

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Sources (5)

1. Mississippi State University Extension, Honeybee Hive Establishment Costs (P4136) extension.msstate.edu
2. University of Missouri Extension, Beekeeping Planning Budget (G692) extension.missouri.edu
3. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Honey (March 13, 2026) nass.usda.gov
4. Mississippi State University Extension, Mississippi Beekeeping Calendar (P4053) extension.msstate.edu
5. UC Davis E.L. Niño Bee Lab, Backyard Beekeeping Timeline for California cambp.ucdavis.edu