You can easily get 50-60 lbs honey from a single honey bee hives.
A strong hive can produce up to 40 to 50 pounds in a good year.
@BigBadBob harvested around 70 liters, by my calculations. At around 1.5 kilos of honey per liter, that means he got over 100 kilos. That equals over 220 pounds.
Where I live you can average a hundred kilos of honey per year per hive, if you work your bees right.
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Hi Jeff, it is interesting to note that both you and @BigBadBob are in the subtropics. Buderim is an incredibly wet place too, but rain days per month is not high, giving the bees time to gather nectar I guess.
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Ok Jeff I appreciate that youāre coming around to the metric system which is great but, itās ālitreā dude! Not the silly imperialistic easy spelling āliterā!
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Hi Skegg, I take the easy way & go along with whatever āspell checkā likes. It likes flavor, but dislikes flavour. So I just type flavor. I know the proper spelling is flavour, the same as the proper spelling for litre is litre.
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PS, generally speaking, my spelling at atrotious, therefore I need āspell checkā so that my spelling is not so atrocious.
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A couple of months ago at our monthly Southern Capes Apiarist Society meeting a Dr Liz Barbour gave a very interesting talkā¦, within which(unless memory fails me) she mentioned that the world record for honey production for 1 hive in 1 year was 400kgā¦, of Karri Honey(in S/W W.A). Seems unbelievableā¦, but now I have just read in āHoneybee.orgā that another record for honey production in 1 year, was also in WA and was recorded by a commercial apiarist of 357kg of honey for āeachā or 400 hives !
If these are correct figuresā¦, Iām guessing that was also for Karriā¦, and it was during a Karri heavy āflowā year.
Anyone care to comment ?
Shhhhh. Donāt tell those guys in the eastern states Malcolm, theyāll come here and bring their beetles with them.
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Commercial bee keepers have to go chasing any honey flow, even up to a few hundred Kās away from the extractor shed. So those guys need a high hive yield.
Hobby bee keepers usually have the hives in one location year round and the colony get flows and the odd dearth so the bee keeper is never going to set any records. There is no average yield of honey to expect but with good hive management and a reasonable year then you can expect a harvest that will give you more honey than your family needs, some extra for neighbors and friends, and if you have more than that then you have done pretty well. Iām talking there of a person having a couple of hives at home.
Then in between is guys like me who are addicted to bee keeping and have the time available to put the time into doing it, if I extract an average of 100 kilos of honey from my hives over a year Iām happy.
Cheers
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I have just had a look at my notes from a talk by John Karasinski, Curtin Uni, gave earlier this year. In it he estimated that in WA the average honey production of WA hobbyists is ~20kg per hive per year and commercial 250-300kg per hive per year.
Interestingly back in the 1940sā the average commercial production of a commercial UK Beekeeper was 20kg per hive per year. I wonder what it is now?
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How do they do it? it is more that 10 times the yield. Migratory hives?
When I first started out beekeepingā¦1976ā¦with two hives I couldnāt figure it out how commercial guys in my area pulled off the big yields. So instead of using 2 lb packages, I switched up to 4 lb packagesā¦my way of addressing my beekeeping management incompetence. That opened a new world for me.
Beekeepingā¦in my estimationā¦is the most specialized form of animal husbandry. And not only is the actual hands on work with the hive importantā¦but an understanding of the biome and climate in your area is equally important. Very little of this knowledge is found in textbooksā¦and itās my experience that production conditions for bees can vary dramatically within just 20 miles.
What are the optimal conditions for those honeybeesā¦a lifelong quest?
And then when you finally think you have it all figured out, this happens in your backyard:
Looking for used Polaris snowmobiles now 
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What a great post @Doug1. I agree, it is the local details that really matter, once you have the bee biology concepts. Very nicely explained. 
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Yes, well put as usual Doug.
And, it seems, youāre taking migratory beekeeping to a new level.
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Thanks Doug for the info.
So true, as I am finding that out.
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A good thing would be to find a local mentor. One who is successful with his/her own bees. Youāll get an idea from how much honey his/her hives are producing. That will give you a yardstick to aim for.
There is a myriad of variables to consider before determining the average amount of honey a hive can produce in a year. Too many to list.
Dawn could be correct in saying probably no honey in the first year, however someone in West Australia recently harvested honey within only 3 months of installing some bees. Itās the classic piece of string question. It depends on the size of the colony to start with, the quality of the queen, the time of season & available resources for the bees to forage on.
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Part of it is knowing the flows and locations, having the hives ready for the flow (bee numbers) and chasing the flow.
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Thanks Dawnā¦what amazes me is how many seasons one can burn through trying to figure out the details. About three years ago, commercial guys just north of me were claiming they were getting a honeyflow off goldenrodā¦I was skeptical because I used to run bees in that area when I was commercial and there sure wasnāt any flow off goldenrod and I found out through my botany training that the species of goldenrod we had wasnāt known to secrete nectar. Not only that, I wasnāt aware of any beekeepers in the whole province ever getting honey from goldenrodā¦ever. But here those neighboring beekeepers were saying the opposite. So I happened to travel through that area and I found that a another insectā¦the tent caterpillarā¦had totally defoiliaged huge tracts of the forest canopy so now sunlight penetrated and hit the florest floor where goldenrod grew and for once the goldenrod really flourishedā¦nectar and all. The cause and effect of insects (tent caterpillar) on other insects (honeybees) took me totally offguardā¦who would of expected that! Sure keeps one humble.
So true, as I am finding that out.
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Watch out! Youāre about to become hopelessly addicted.
Our 1kg New Zealand packages are installed the first week of Mayā¦boosted with bulk bees from our wintered colonies after there is capped brood in the NZ package units. Dandelion and significant willow honey starts around the 3rd week of Mayā¦dandelion granulates easilyā¦willow finally finishes 6 weeks laterā¦there are many varietals of willow. But that mixture of spring nectar honey (40kg to 80kg/hive) has to be removed before the main flow from clovers/alfalfa startā¦usually by the end of June. The bees are working close to 18 hrs/dayā¦if the temperatures are warm enough. If we get 3 weeks of flying weather out of the total 6 weeks weā¦and the beesā¦are happy.
Hereās a video of our wintered colonies that we later get bulk bees fromā¦note the snow on the ground. We treat those wintered colonies as a source for bulk bees and nucsā¦not honey production directlyā¦the queens have already put in one season last year and will last only a couple of months more.
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