{"id":987,"date":"2023-12-20T17:42:18","date_gmt":"2023-12-20T22:42:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beekeepingfornewbies.com\/?p=987"},"modified":"2023-12-20T17:42:20","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T22:42:20","slug":"beekeeping-hobby","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beekeepingfornewbies.com\/beekeeping-hobby\/","title":{"rendered":"Beekeeping As A Hobby
(Is Right It For You?)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Beekeeping as a hobby is a great way to connect with nature. Besides honey, beekeeping has other potential rewards, both personal and commercial. But it requires commitment, investment, and ongoing learning. If you are comfortable with the challenges, beekeeping can be a rewarding and worthwhile pursuit.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In this article, we’ll discuss some of the pros and cons, the opportunities and challenges of backyard beekeeping to help you decide if beekeeping as a hobby is right for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beekeepers are generally placed into three categories: commercial, sidelined, or hobbyist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A commercial beekeeper manages over 300 hives and is operating a full-time business. A hobbyist is a beekeeper with fewer than 25 beehives. Sideliners are in the middle and generate a portion of their income from beekeeping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the National Honey Board (“NHB”),<\/a> there are as many as 125,000 beekeepers in the United States and the “vast majority of them are hobbyists” (often called backyard beekeepers). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. Department of Agriculture<\/a> goes much further, estimating that there are about 212,000 beekeepers in the U.S. and that over 94% of them are hobbyists. (The difference in the numbers may stem from the age of the NHB’s info, which is based on a 2012 survey.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I couldn\u2019t find any hard statistics to back me up, but it seems to me that interest in backyard beekeeping picked up steam over the past decade for two main reasons: publicity about colony collapse disorder and the wildly successful crowdfunding campaign for the Flow\u2122 Hive<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, during the Covid pandemic, interest in beekeeping spiked, as shown in the Google Trends chart below.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBeekeeping As A Hobby<\/h2>\n\n\n\n