How much honey does one hive produce in a year?

What the numbers look like

• Temperate hobby beekeeping: 10 to 30 kg of surplus per colony in an average year is a reasonable expectation.
• A strong colony on a good flow: 50 kg or more, and exceptional single-flow years well beyond that.
• A poor year: nothing at all, and syrup feeding to get the colony through winter.
• The colony's own consumption: broadly comparable to the surplus. Most of what a hive collects is eaten by the hive.
• Stingless bees: one to two litres a year from a Melipona colony. Australian sugarbag, around a kilogram.

What decides it

1. Forage. What is flowering within a few kilometres, and for how long. A landscape with a summer gap caps the crop regardless of how strong the colony is.
2. Weather during the flow. Nectar secretion is far more weather-dependent than flowering is — a lime tree in full bloom in a dry wind yields nothing.
3. Colony strength at the right moment. A colony that peaks two weeks after the flow has missed it.
4. Subspecies and stock. Italian bees rear brood late and consume more; Carniolans contract sharply and leave more as surplus.
5. Disease and varroa load, which cap everything else.