Hello Malcolm! Long time no see. :)
 
My last letter to Bee-L said what a small world this was, but I really
hadn't expected to meet an old friend and workmate with the same hobby
and the same editing job via a mailing list in the States.
 
I suspect the difference between our yield figures reflect the way we
take our average, rather than any significant difference in actual yield.
 
I agree that yields here in the last few years have often been _much_
better than the figure I quoted. The figure I quoted is a perhaps
slightly out of date long term rolling average across all stocks and is
the figure used by the UK Bee Farmers' Association. Many colonies in
recent years certainly have made 100 to 150lb (some much more) but some
die in the winter so produce nil; some swarm and produce very little as
a consequence; Some just don't do too well. Some years are also bad and
we should consider all these factors. It doesn't take many minor problems
like these to knock a large yield away to a much smaller average. Don't
get me wrong here, I'm not saying that you or anyone else can't get these
figures, but I would say that _most_ hobby beekeepers fool themselves if
they think they do _much_ better than the professionals. Equally of
course, for the pros, honey yield per colony is not the only way to
calculate performance as pollination and queen breeding are also major
factors, so the pros don't always add thing up the way we do.
 
For Sue and I personally, the last two years have been pretty desperate
as we had a severe outbreak of EFB which would not respond to treatment
and all our colonies on that site were eventually destroyed. Our yield
for five colonies last year was the 30 or so pounds I got from a nuke on
another site and which went into winter as four newly queened nukes.
That will ruin our personal average yield for a year or two.