Try Honey For Money

30YEARS AGO While beekeeping can be a lucrative hobby or occupation, it is a difficult and time-consuming venture.

- 

If you want bees and honey to make sweet music to you and your bank manager, it’s better to specialise because there is much to learn. Bees don’t necessarily need close management, but management must be correct. These are the views of experienced beekeeper HL Hardy of Dunswart on the East Rand.

If you devote all your energies to making honey your only smallholder business, manage the bees correctly and give them access to additional fodder areas, beekeeping can be more rewarding than many other smallholder operations, he says.

Probably the question most often asked by anyone starting with bees is: ‘Where can I set up hives?’

The answer to this, for the amateur, anyway, is anywhere, provided normal precautions are taken to protect the bees as well as the people and animals in the area.