How Much Honey Does a Hive Produce?
Real Australian numbers, by hive type, region and season.
The short answer: a healthy backyard Langstroth in Australia produces 15 to 30kg of honey a year, with good years and strong sites reaching 50kg+. Commercial migratory hives chasing flowering can exceed 100kg, but a backyard hive on fixed forage will not.
What moves the number
- Forage within 3km matters more than anything you do. Leafy suburbs with street trees and gardens reliably outperform paddocks.
- Season quality: a wet spring followed by steady flowering doubles a dry year. Gum flowering is famously boom-and-bust.
- Colony strength: a strong colony stores surplus; a struggling one eats everything it makes. This is why swarm prevention and mite control ARE honey production.
- Region: subtropical hives produce most of the year; Tasmanian hives compress everything into three months (but one of them might be leatherwood).
By hive type
- Langstroth (8-10 frame): 15-30kg/year backyard average. Each full honey super holds roughly 15-20kg.
- Flow hive: same bees, same forage, same totals, the tap changes harvesting, not biology.
- Top bar / Warre: usually 60-80% of a Langstroth, comb is rebuilt after each harvest.
- Native stingless (OATH): up to 1kg of sugarbag a year in the subtropics, harvested in warm months only. You keep them for pollination, not volume.
When do you harvest?
When frames are 80%+ capped and the colony has surplus beyond its own needs: typically late spring and again in autumn in the south, and almost rolling harvests in the subtropics. Never harvest during a treatment withholding period (details here), and always leave winter stores: a southern colony needs 15kg+ going into May.
What is that honey worth?
Raw local honey retails at $15-25/kg. AI-generated illustration.
Raw local honey retails at $15-25/kg, so an average backyard hive returns $270-540 of honey a year against $50-100 of running costs. The app tracks your harvests per hive and values them at your local price.
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Images on this page are AI-generated illustrations.