What does the pull fill — and what did a pound really cost?
Weigh the pull or measure it in gallons — honey is 11.84 pounds a gallon, not water's 8.34 — then split it across the jar sizes you actually fill, divide the season's spending into it honestly, mix the fall syrup by weight, and — if you say how many hives — read the pull and the spend per hive. One calculator: change a number and the rest rolls.
The pull
Weigh it if you can; measure it in gallons if that is what your buckets know. Fill either one.
The bottling plan
Your jar sizes as fills in ounces — a "1 lb jar" is a 16 oz fill. Whole jars only; a part-filled jar is not a jar you can sell.
Feed syrup, by weight
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
This is one calculator, not three.
The pull feeds the bottling plan. The plan feeds what the honey in every jar cost. The season's spending feeds that cost, the syrup mix sits beside it, and the yard reads every one of them per hive. Change the gallons or the jar fill and everything below rolls — the same way the app rolls when you import a recipe and adjust one number.
In your shop it is the same calculator with your rows behind it. Your shelf answers before you pour: “you can bottle 96 with what's on the shelf — 404 more would need honey, jars and lids,” with the numbers. The bottling plan lands in Make with How many already filled in. The yard is a count you set once, never a material that gets used up. A web calculator cannot do any of that, because it has never seen your shelf.
Watch the difference — 19 seconds, silent
The three sums a beekeeper does every season
A pull, a bottling plan, a season's honest cost, and the fall syrup — the sums every keeper does on a bucket lid in September. The math below is the same math the calculator runs, in the open.
Why 11.84 pounds a gallon?
Because honey is not water. Water runs 8.34 pounds a gallon; honey's density puts a true gallon at about 11.84 — which is why a five-gallon bucket of honey weighs near sixty pounds and why eyeballing a pull in 'gallons' then pricing it in pounds goes wrong without the conversion. Weighing is always the better answer; the gallons path exists because buckets are what a honey house actually has.
What did a pound of my honey really cost?
The season's own spending divided by the pounds that actually came off — nothing fancier, and nothing kinder. The forum complaint this answers is 'every year I make more honey, and my expenses scale with it': sugar, treatments, jars, a replacement nuc, the club extractor rental. Divide the real spending by the real pull and some years the answer stings. That number is what the honey cost; what you CHARGE stands on it, plus your time — which is a pricing decision, never a cost entry.
Why are jars counted in whole numbers?
Because a part-filled jar is not sellable inventory. The bottling plan floors every row — 59.6 jars is 59 jars and some honey back in the bucket — and tells you what is left over rather than pretending fractional jars exist. If the plan overruns the pull, it says so instead of quietly borrowing honey you do not have.
Why is syrup mixed by weight and not volume?
Because the ratios that matter — 1:1 for spring build-up, 2:1 for fall stores — are sugar to water BY WEIGHT, and a 'gallon of sugar' is not a meaningful measure. This page takes the water in gallons (what your bucket knows), converts it to pounds, and hands you the sugar weight to pour in. Thick fall syrup takes patience and heat to dissolve; the weights are the part arithmetic can do for you.