Getting started

The dream of your own honey, a humming hive in the garden and being closer to nature is catching more and more people. And rightly so, because beekeeping is one of the most absorbing pursuits I know. But before you buy your first hive, I want to tell you something you will not hear in an advert: an apiary is not a honey machine you set up and harvest. These are living animals, responsibility, a bit of paperwork and a season that can put you through the wringer. This guide will walk you through the beginning honestly, without the sugar-coating, so you go into it with your eyes open and do not get burned.

This is the first text in the part for those just starting out. I am glad you are here, because if you are reading before you buy hives, it means you approach the subject with your head, not on impulse, and that is the best possible start. You will not find here a promise that you will earn a fortune in the first year, because that would be a lie. What you will find is a calm, honest road map: from knowledge, through formalities and equipment, to your first colonies and your first season. Treat it as a chat over coffee with someone who has already walked this road and wants to save you a few painful stumbles.

Knowledge first, hives later

The commonest beginner's mistake is to buy hives and bees, and only then wonder what to do with them. Reverse that order. Bees are living organisms with complex biology, not equipment that runs itself. Before you spend your first coin, give a season or two to learning.

The best learning is practice under the eye of an experienced beekeeper. Find a mentor, join a local beekeeping circle, go to workshops, tag along at inspections. Add a beekeeping course, a good book and following reliable sources. In Poland the beekeeping circles, agricultural advisory centres and associations run training, often cheap or free. A year spent at someone else's hives before you set up your own will save you a heap of mistakes, wasted money and, most importantly, dead colonies. Bees forgive less than you think.

Formalities, or what the law requires

I know the word formalities sounds like the dullest part of the adventure, but relax, there are really few of them and they can be sorted in one afternoon. Good news to start: in Poland you need no special permit or licence to keep bees. But a few things have to be dealt with, and it is best to do them right away, so you can sleep easy.

The first and obligatory one is registering the apiary with the district veterinary officer, the one for the place where the hives stand, not for your address of residence. It applies to every apiary, even a single hive by the house, because the rules provide no threshold exempt from registration. And let me correct a popular myth at once: registration is not free. For the issue of a certificate with the apiary number you pay a stamp duty, currently 17 złoty, and at a later application for a number for direct sale another small fee of a dozen or so złoty. You get a veterinary identification number, and the apiary comes under veterinary supervision. Not registering is an offence liable to a penalty, so it is an obligation, not an option.

And an important thing easily forgotten: this is not a one-off formality. From 2026 there is an obligation to update the number of colonies and the apiary's location twice a year, by 31 March and by 30 September, and any significant change is reported as it happens. The rules are fresh and in places still settling, so check the current deadlines and details with your district veterinary officer, so as not to be caught by a penalty for a late update, because those can be steep.

The second formality is registration with the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture and an agricultural producer number. It is not necessary just to keep bees, but becomes needed if you want to use subsidies and support programmes, and those are real, such as the payment for overwintered colonies.

As for documentation, let us correct another myth: there is no legal obligation to keep an inspection diary. Treatment is another matter, because since honey is food, you are obliged to keep records of the medicines and treatments used, that is what, when and which colony you treated. And if you are going to sell honey, hygiene procedures, good manufacturing practice and a sales register come in, of which more below. An inspection diary is worth keeping for yourself, but that is your convenience, not a requirement of law.

Where to place the hives

Location can decide an apiary's success more than expensive equipment. A few rules.

Most important is the forage base, that is the honey plants within the bees' flight range, roughly within two or three kilometres. Orchards, meadows, oilseed rape, limes, acacia, goldenrod, forest, all of it does the job. Check too how many beekeepers already operate nearby, because in crowded terrain your bees will fight over forage with others, of which I wrote separately under overcrowding.

The hive should stand in a dry spot, sheltered from strong wind, best with the entrance facing east or south, so the bees start flights early. Avoid cold, damp hollows.

And a thing many novices underrate, though it has real legal force: neighbours and distances. True, there is no single nationwide statute fixing the metres, but that does not mean you can put a hive wherever you like. Two things bind you. First, local resolutions, that is municipal regulations on keeping cleanliness and order, which in many places directly set hive distances, fence heights and sometimes even the maximum number of colonies, and that is hard local law. Second, the Civil Code and so-called indirect nuisance: if your bees excessively hinder a neighbour's use of their plot, they can pursue it in court, and the courts draw on the established distance norm.

In practice the following standard is applied, used for a long time also in case law: hives at least 10 metres from the plot boundary, buildings and busy public roads, at least 50 metres from motorways and expressways, and at least 150 metres from public places such as schools, kindergartens, playgrounds or hospitals. The distance from the boundary can be reduced, roughly to three metres, if you separate the apiary from the boundary with a solid barrier, a wall, fence, dense hedge or netting, of a height of at least two, and more safely three, metres, which forces the bees to rise above people's heads. Always direct the entrance to the side of passers-by, not at the pavement, playground or a neighbour's windows.

So before you set up the first hive, be sure to check the municipal cleanliness and order regulation, because it, not general custom, may impose specific requirements on you. And take care of good relations with the neighbour, because the most effective protection for an apiary is sometimes not a fence, but a jar of fresh honey handed over in time.

How many colonies to start with

There is one temptation: to start big. I advise against it. But do not start from a single colony either, because that is a trap. With one hive you have no comparison, you do not see what is the norm and what a problem, and if that one colony weakens or dies, you are left with nothing.

A sensible start is two, and best three, colonies. Such a scale lets you learn by comparison, that is see how a strong colony differs from a weak one, and in trouble rescue one at the expense of another, for instance by equalising strengths. And at the same time it does not yet generate the costs and work of an apiary of a dozen or so hives. From two or three colonies you can always expand once you have grasped what is going on.

Worth knowing that for the ARiMR subsidy programmes a minimum of ten colonies is usually required, so if you are thinking of support, that is a goal for later, not for the first season.

Where to get the bees

You have a few routes, and it is no trivial choice, because your first season depends on the quality and health of the starter colonies.

My advice for a beginner is this: to start it is best to combine the two, that is buy one strong, overwintered colony and one or two nucs alongside. A strong overwintered colony gives you at once a full-value unit on which you learn real management, you see what a developed colony looks like, and in a good season you will even gather something. A nuc, that is a small colony with a young queen, a few combs of brood and bees, made up by a beekeeper, is in turn easier to run, has a known young queen and grows steadily through the season, teaching you patience. With both, you have the invaluable-for-learning comparison of a strong colony and a building one.

Buy only from a trusted, local beekeeper, best one who will show you the colonies and advise. Avoid bees from an uncertain source, because with them it is easy to drag in diseases, including varroa or foulbrood. Local bees have one more advantage: they are adapted to your climate and flows.

A swarm, that is a naturally issued colony, can be cheap, but is more demanding and has an uncertain queen, so for a novice it is rather an interesting extra than the base to build a first apiary on.

Equipment to start

You do not have to buy the whole catalogue at once. To start you need the basics.

Choose hives of one type, so the frames are interchangeable between colonies. In Poland the Wielkopolski is the most popular, but check what the beekeepers in your area run, because it is then easier to exchange frames, nucs and advice. For each colony you need a hive with a set: floor, box, frames, crownboard, roof.

Add protective gear, that is a suit or a jacket with a hat and veil plus gloves, because at first calm around bees comes with time. The basic tools are a hive tool and a smoker, plus a bee brush. For feeding a feeder, and for the harvest an extractor, but that last one you can borrow to start or use a shared one at the beekeeping circle, because in the first season there is rarely much to spin anyway.

How much it costs

No beating about the bush, because it is worth knowing what you are signing up for. Prices are indicative and variable, but give a picture.

A single hive with complete fittings is roughly 500 to 1,200 złoty, depending on whether new or used and of what type. A nuc or a swarm is about 350 to 600 złoty. Protective gear is 100 to 200, tools 150 to 300, medicines and prevention for the first year 100 to 200 złoty. Add a course, if you have no mentor, from 300 to 1,500.

In total, setting up a small apiary, of the order of two or three colonies with full fittings, is realistically a few thousand złoty, the range most often given being about five to six thousand. It can be cheaper, buying used equipment and kitting out in stages, but do not skimp on the bees' health or on your own knowledge.

Selling honey step by step: direct sale, farm retail and thresholds

If you dream of selling your own honey, you have to know one thing: hand-to-hand sale with no paperwork is a grey zone and an offence. But legalising it is simpler than it seems, and you have two main routes.

First, though, the real scale. With two or three colonies in the first seasons you usually have nothing to sell, because the surplus barely suffices for family and friends, and that is entirely legal, because treating or giving honey to your nearest is not placing it on the market. Real selling is realistically thought of from a few colonies up, and earning sensibly begins only from a dozen or so.

Direct sale. The simpler form to register for a small beekeeper. It lets you sell raw honey from your own apiary, at home, at a market, at beekeeping events, without a cash register, and income from your own honey is exempt from tax. It has a range limit, though: you sell only within your own voivodeship and the neighbouring ones.

Farm retail trade (RHD). A little more paperwork, but greater scope. You sell across Poland, also to shops, restaurants or canteens, and the tax-free amount is really high, of the order of a hundred thousand złoty a year. Quantity limits apply depending on the number of colonies, along with keeping a sales register and marking the point of sale. RHD is today the simplest route to legal, wider honey sales.

Both routes you start with an application to the district veterinary officer, for RHD filed thirty days before you start. In both cases the honey label must meet food requirements: name, net weight, best-before date, producer's details and country of origin, and from 2026 for blends you must give the countries of origin in order of share. An important threshold for the future: above eighty colonies beekeeping becomes a special branch of agricultural production and enters other rules, but that is a worry for later.

And most important, which a beginner often forgets: legal sale is not only paper, but the conditions in which you obtain the honey. Extraction and packing must take place in hygienic conditions, in a separate, clean room that can be kept in order, not in a henhouse next to the hens. Equipment in contact with honey, that is the extractor, uncapping tools, sieves, buckets and jars, must be food-grade, best of stainless steel or food-safe plastics. Add simple good-practice procedures: washing and disinfecting equipment, protecting honey from contamination, and the health of the person working with honey. And here a concrete point easily forgotten: since you have contact with unpackaged food, you need a health certificate for sanitary-epidemiological purposes, what used to be called the sanepid health booklet, issued on the basis of simple carrier tests by an occupational health doctor and kept at the workplace in case of inspection. The veterinary service and the sanitary inspectorate can check these conditions and documents. When selling you also keep a sales and honey-batch register and mark the point of sale with a sign bearing the required data. It sounds daunting, but in practice for a small apiary it comes down to a clean, separate extraction room and a few sheets of documentation.

In short: up to five colonies you usually make honey for yourself, family and friends with any surplus, and need report nothing. Want to sell outside, you choose direct sale or RHD and adapt the conditions of obtaining the honey, and at about ten colonies and more RHD starts to make real sense.

The apiary journal, or how to stay on top of it all

The longer you read this text, the clearer it is that beekeeping is not only looking into the hive, but a mass of things to keep track of: inspections, treatment, treatment dates, the state of each colony, the documentation the vet requires, and when selling, the honey-batch register. Keeping this in your head or a paper notebook quickly becomes a slog, especially as colonies multiply.

That is exactly why Beehive Hub was made. It is a digital apiary journal in which you run your apiaries, and within them each hive and each colony separately. On the hive card you record its type, the number of boxes and supers, the frame layout, the floor type and the equipment, for instance a feeder, a queen excluder or insulation. On the colony card you note its strength, temperament, swarming mood and queen cells, and warning signals such as a lack of food, eggs, brood or bee bread. Each inspection records the changes to the hive and colony together with notes, so over time you have a clear history of each colony and of the whole apiary.

Separately you keep the queens, with their breed, line, number, year, status and whether they are marked or wing-clipped, and the treatments: for each you record the disease, the medicine name, the dose, the date of administration and the date of the next dose. That last is doubly valuable, because the app will remind you of the next dose so none slips by, and along the way you are keeping the treatment record the law requires of you anyway. Add to this the feedings and harvests, so the whole management of a colony is in one place. This is the moment when a digital journal turns from a convenience into a real ticking-off of a statutory duty.

For a beginner it is also priceless that the app works in the field offline, because in the apiary there is rarely good signal, and dictated notes reach the system anyway once you catch a network. Speaking of which, voice: Beehive Hub lets you dictate observations with the hive open, when your hands are busy with a frame and sticky with propolis, instead of taking off gloves and tapping a screen. For a larger apiary it is simply the order without which mess and oversights come easily.

When it comes to selling: an offer with no commission

And when you reach the stage where you have honey to sell, another matter comes up: how to reach customers without giving half the profit to middlemen. Selling among friends has its ceiling, and listing on big trading platforms means commissions that, at the price of a jar of honey, can hurt.

Here too Beehive Hub helps, because besides the apiary journal it gives beekeepers the option of listing their own products with no commission at all. You list your honey, and a buyer looking for real honey from a beekeeper in their area comes straight to you and orders directly, even without setting up an account, and you agree the payment and delivery between yourselves. The platform does not mediate payments and takes no commission from you. For a beginner just building a circle of customers, it is a simple way to show up locally and sell honestly produced honey directly, as it should be. Just remember that the sale itself must still be legalised by one of the routes described above, because the platform is a tool for reaching the customer, not an exemption from formalities.

The first season, or what nobody tells you

And now the most important thing in the whole text, honest to the bone. Do not count the first season in jars of honey. If someone promises you buckets of honey in the first year, they are selling you a dream, not knowledge.

The first season is learning and observation. Success is not honey, but well-conducted management: colonies that developed, swarming kept under control, varroa mastered in time and colonies prepared for winter. The honey result in Polish conditions depends heavily on weather and flows, and is something of a lottery you have no control over. The real test of the first year is whether your colonies enter winter strong and healthy, and come out of it in spring. Only the second season usually brings the first real harvest, and earning is talked of from the third year up, if at all.

Accept this from the start and you will spare yourself disappointment. Beekeeping rewards the patient, not the hasty.

Do not be afraid to start

I know that after such a dose of formalities, costs and warnings it is easy to feel like giving up. That was not my aim. I only wanted you to go into this consciously, because beekeeping really is worth the effort. There is nothing better than standing in spring by a hive teeming with life, catching that scent of wax and honey and knowing that these thousands of bees are thriving in your care. And the first jar of your own honey tastes different from any bought one, because there is a piece of your work and your patience in it.

Start calmly, with two or three colonies, a good mentor and learning. You will make mistakes, everyone does, but bees are a patient teacher if only you want to learn from them. And once you catch the bug, and you almost certainly will, that first hive will soon turn into a second, a third and more. Fingers crossed, and may it go well for you, as the beekeepers say.

Curiosities and controversies

Saving the bees is not about setting up hives. The popular slogan that by starting an apiary you save the bees is a myth. The honey bee is a managed species under human care and is not endangered. It is wild pollinators that need saving, of which I wrote separately, and you help them with flowers and wild corners, not another hive. Set up an apiary for yourself, for the joy and the honey, but do not delude yourself that you are thereby saving nature.

The first year is a cost, not a profit. Many beginners go into beekeeping counting on quick extra income and are quickly disappointed. On a small scale, beekeeping in the first years is more about limiting the cost of an expensive hobby than earning. Whoever counts on profit from the first season usually burns out and abandons the hives after a year or two.

A subsidy for hives with no formalities is usually a con. If someone promises you easy funding for an apiary with no papers or conditions, they are almost certainly selling a course or a dream. Real support from ARiMR has rules, deadlines, a requirement of a minimum of ten colonies and cashless settlement. The real money is there, but it goes through formalities, not shortcuts.

One hive is a worse idea than three. Against the intuition that it is better to start modestly with one hive, a single colony is a trap. Without comparison you will not tell the norm from a problem, and if that one colony dies, you end the adventure before it began. Two or three colonies are a safer and better start for learning.

Most common beginner's mistakes

Buying hives before gaining knowledge. Equipment is bought after learning, not before. A season at someone else's hives is worth more than the priciest starter set.

Starting from one colony. Without comparison you cannot see what is the norm. Start from two or three colonies.

Bees from an uncertain source. A cheap colony from a random seller can drag in varroa or foulbrood. Buy from a trusted, local beekeeper.

Poor hive placement and ignoring distances. An entrance facing a neighbour, pavement or playground is a ready conflict, and distances are bound by the municipal resolution and the Civil Code. Check the local regulation, keep the distances and direct flights to the side of people.

Counting on honey in the first year. The first season is learning, not harvest. Success is strong, healthy colonies entering winter, not full jars.

Skipping registration and updates. Registration with the district veterinary officer is obligatory (a stamp duty of around 17 złoty), and its absence is an offence. Remember too the update of colony numbers twice a year, by 31 March and 30 September.

Selling honey without formalities. Hand-to-hand honey trade without direct sale or RHD is a grey zone and a real risk of a penalty. Before you start selling, choose a legal route.

Sources and further reading

• District Veterinary Inspectorates and the Chief Veterinary Inspectorate, and beekeeping portals (among others e-pszczelarz.pl, oku.pl, pszczelipuls.pl). Rules of apiary registration 2026, the stamp duty and the obligation to update colony numbers by 31 March and 30 September (legal state changing from 2026).

• Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture. Beekeeping interventions of the CAP Strategic Plan 2023-2027, support conditions and the minimum of ten colonies.

• Agricultural advisory centres and beekeeping associations and circles. Training, courses, advice and beekeeper liability insurance for beginners.

• Legal bases of apiary siting: municipal cleanliness and order regulations (local law), Civil Code art. 144 (indirect nuisance) and the established distance norm (10 m from boundary and roads, 50 m from motorways, 150 m from public places, 3 m with a barrier). Plus association materials on beekeeper liability insurance.

• Materials on direct sale and farm retail trade of honey (among others MODR, Pasieka24, PZP, oku.pl) on legal sale, hygiene requirements, labelling, limits and the 80-colony threshold.

• Practical guides on setting up an apiary and start-up costs (among others oku.pl, agrofakty.pl, KSOW). Basis of the parts on equipment, prices and the first season.