How many bee boxes do I need to start commercial honey production?

Starting with a reasonable number of strong colonies and then splitting them myself was cheaper than buying boxes. Training before starting saved me from beginner mistakes with the queen and brood.

Your honey yield depends hugely on what is flowering near you and the season. I started keeping my boxes near litchi and mustard flowering and the difference in honey was big. Scout your local flowering calendar before deciding how many boxes you can really feed.

Do not count only on honey. I earn a useful amount taking my boxes to orchards for pollination and selling extra colonies to new beekeepers. Migrating the boxes to chase the flowering through the year lifted my honey a lot but it is hard work, so build up to it.

Start smaller than you think and learn to manage the colonies through one full year before adding boxes. I expanded too fast my first year and could not give each colony proper attention, so several swarmed or weakened. Once I had the hang of queen and brood management, multiplying my own strong colonies was cheap and easy.

The species you keep changes everything. The Italian bee gives more honey per box but needs more care and feeding in the lean season, while the local bee is hardier on less. I keep mostly the higher yielding type but feed sugar syrup in the dearth period so the colonies do not collapse. Plan for that lean season cost.

Selling raw honey loose fetched me little until I started straining it clean, bottling it properly and selling direct to households and shops, which roughly doubled what I got per kg. Good clean processing and a bit of branding is where the real money in beekeeping is, not just producing more.