Where one has a limited capital and wishes to become an expert or a specialist, it is far better to begin on a small scale and gradually increase his number of colonies making them pay their way and also furnish funds for new investments.
If your first lessons have been gleaned from flaming advertisements or reports of enormous yields, or through reading some of the overdrawn works on apiculture (so written with the purpose of making new converts), just take some wholesome, practical food for study and thought, both by securing one or more of the works on practical apiculture mentioned in this journal, and by visiting some practical and successful apiarist. In this way, you will be prepared to look at both sides; and if, after doing this, you enter into beekeeping with a determination to succeed you are certain to make it pay, provided you are adapted to the business, and other things are equal.
There is not the slightest reason why nearly every person who has a fair-sized garden should not keep a few colonies of bees and thus provide the table with nature’s purest and most healthful sweets. Success in any vocation always means hard work, together with push, tact, and energy. Thousands embark each year on the sea of business enterprise and the shoals and quicksands are strewn with stranded wrecks, yet there are those who, by rigid economy and shrewd management, accumulate a competency besides establishing a good remunerative business.
Our advice to those who wish to engage in beekeeping would as a rule be this. If at present you have no location, look about you and find a small place of from one to ten acres according to your means and the situation.
It is better to have the land slope to the south and east if possible and it should be well protected from the cold north and west winds. Perhaps you can rent or lease a place adapted to your needs. The surrounding country should be well supplied with bee pasturage in the shape of orchards, clover, basswood (if possible), wild flowers or many others that we might name but which are described in most of the works on apiculture.
Where one is located in the city or village and means to keep only a few colonies this advice is unnecessary, but with all others it is imperative that they locate in a good honey-producing district.
It is also best to learn if there are many bees kept where you wish to locate; as, while there is no law to prevent your establishing an apiary by the side of your neighbor, yet the latter has rights which it is proper and just to respect. This again will not matter without you intend to build up a large apiary.
One may secure a large yield of honey and yet find a poor market for it; hence it is always best to take into consideration the advantages for establishing a good home market. It will pay far better than shipping to large markets and giving all your profits to commission men.
There are so many items of interest which should serve as an introduction to these papers that we hardly know where to stop and must be necessarily brief and even leave many of them until we write again. In purchasing bees it is best if you want but from one to five colonies to purchase them of some reliable dealer and always select a standard frame, and it will pay you well to look into the merits of the various frames before making your purchase.
While for some reasons we prefer a frame about 10 × 15, yet as the “Langstroth Standard” is now so largely in use and is no objection as regards wintering the bees, we deem it best to adopt it in our own apiaries.