When I kept bees, a good few years ago, I found it quite time
consuming. I only had two hives, but weekly inspections for queen
cells, general health and expansion during the season, followed by
honey comb removal, spinning out the honey by hand in early autumn,
bottling the honey, cleaning up the comb afterwards and feeding the
bees sugar syrup for their winter stores took a lot of time. I used to
get an average of about 45 lbs of honey, per hive, per season, but TBH
I wasn't sorry when I gave it up.

Chris

I keep my bees mainly as pets for pollination. Here in the far North, I only
tend to make honey one year in three (and this aint one of them) only taking
some honey off as gifts for friends. You can 'mess' with bees as much or as
little as you want, in fact the mistake that novice beekeepers make is to
mess with the bees too much - the bees know much better how to run their
lives than you do. Couple of empty hives as bait hives for any swarms that
appear and leave them with most (if not all) of their hard won honey, and
they are little work. Just depends how greedy you are.

Phil
Northern Highlands of Scotland, 40 miles N. of Inverness.