Breaking Even

Today is an auspicious day: The Piette Honey factory has broken even! Starting from January 1st, 2012, I have a net positive $18. A big shout-out to John Zehms and Katie Amaya, without whom this threshold could not have been crossed.

Now, my accounting is particularly suspect because I’m depreciating all of my assets in one year. I did that because I never know what will happen in the next year- I might get American Foul Brood and have to burn my hives. Or maybe I’ll get tired of the whole thing and give the hives away to a friend. Plus I can’t think more than a year into the future, so it feels unfair to expect my hardware to retain value over the next 5 years.

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Selling Honey at the Farmer’s Market

Last evening my family and I went to the Washington Farmer’s Market to sell some honey. The event starts at exactly 5:00 on Thursdays at the Washington square, and of course we were running behind (who doesn’t with three children?) But we made it in time and set up our card table. (Funny story- we don’t own a card table, but we had borrowed this one from the Jacksons for our family reunion a few weeks ago. We keep not connecting at the right times to return it, but apparently that was God’s intention. Thank you Jacksons!)

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Beginning Beekeeping

I’m well into my second year of beekeeping- In fact, I’m almost done with my second year! I’ve brought in and bottled a quarter of the harvest so far, there should be at least 90 pounds more to bring in. Now I just need to sell $300 worth and I’ll be solvent enough to do it again next year! I’m not quite ready to write a second post about the adventure, but I do want to point everyone to my writeup after the first year, here. This a very flattering picture that Emily took when I found my first frame of capped honey: (At first, Emily would regularly come out with me, sans armor, with the camera to take pictures. What a brave woman!)