Beekeeping For Dummies

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New ecommerce enterprisers may find them confused and confounded by the tax and accounting requirements of their venture. And that’s a shame: If someone’s spotted a great new category and with great success built a web presence, heck, that an individual shouldn’t find themselves bogged down with the accounting minutia. The enterpriser must focus on increasing traffic, expanding margins, and growing cash profits.

With that in mind, I offer up the following tax and accounting tips:

Tip #1: Don’t Incorporate

A true corporation–whether a C corporation or an S corporation–saddles your business with more elaborated tax accounting and a bunch of state filing requirements. You don’t want to deal with this redtape–or at least not until you’re profitable.

Instead, operate your business as a sole proprietorship. If you’re concerned in regards to legal liability protection, note that you may setup a one-owner fixed liability company, or LLC. A one owner LLC is treated as a sole proprietorship for income tax purposes.

Tip #2: Start Your Business Before Making Investments

Expenditures you make before you’re genuinely in business-in other words, before you’ve got a business license and before you’re marketing or attempting to trade your stuff–aren’t very deductible.

Specifically, you may probably deduct the firstborn $5,000 of these expenses. But any amounts in excess of the $5,000 will have to be amortized over the next fifteen years.

What this means is that you want to commence your business before you begin spending cash on advertising, training, web development, accountants and lawyers and so on.

Tip #3: Automate Your Bookkeeping & Accounting

By law–and a great deal of humans don’t know this–you’re required to maintain an accounting system that lets you without doubt or question measure your income. As a practical matter, this means you need to use a product like Quicken or QuickBooks.

But you ought to go one better than plainly using desktop accounting software. Make sure that you’re taking vantage of online banking and bill payment features which integrate your accounting system with your banking. As much as is possible, for example, you want to be competent to move cash from PayPal to your bank to QuickBooks plainly by typing a few keys or clicking your mouse a few times.

Tip #4: Hire a Payroll Service Before Hiring Employees

Many successful ecommerce business owners may run their operations without employees. And if that’s unfeigned for you, hey, congratulations. If and when you do need employees, however, don’t undertake to handle the payroll yourself. Oursource the payroll to one of the huge payroll service bureaus like ADP, Payroll, or QuickBooks.

These services are expensive. Figure $1000 to $2000 per year. But the services let you keep away from the bookkeeping nightmare called payroll and prevent you from getting into payroll tax trouble.

Tip #5: Consider S Corporation Status After You’re Profitable

I’ve written and talked much regarding how S corporations save taxpayers cash and how the right way to set up an S corporation is primary invent a fixed liability company and then ask the IRS to treat the LLC as an S corporation for tax purposes.

Let me review the basi principles here again, however. Suppose that you’re making $90,000 a year off your web site. If you just treat your business as a sole proprietorship–or an LLC treated as a sole proprietorship–you might remunerate $12,000 in income taxes on the $90,000 and then another 15.3% self-employment tax, or roughly $13,500 on the $90,000.

If you set up an LLC and have the LLC treated as an S corporation, you’ll still compensate the same $12,000 in income taxes. But you’ll only pay the 15.3% self-employment tax on that portion of the net profit that you categorize as wages. If you categorize, say, $50,000 of the profits as wages, you’ll remunerate $7,500 in self-employment taxes. (The other $40,000 in remaining profits, by the way, gets salaried out as a dividend-like “distribution.”)

Note, then, that the S corporation saves you roughly $6,000 each year. Sweet, right?

Now modified — your guide to getting a successful backyard beekeeper

Interested in raising honey bees? This friendly, practical guide presents a step-by-step approach to starting your own beehive, along with expert tips for sustaining a healthful colony. You get the latest on honey bee medication and treatments, harvesting and retail your honey, and the affect the sudden disappearance of the honey bee has on our surroundings and economy.

To bee or not to bee? — comprehend the gains of beekeeping and whether it’s right for you
Build your introductory hive — gather the right equipment, obtain your bees, and transfer them safely to their new home
Get up-close and personal — see how to open and close the hive, inspect your bees at the right times, and know what to look for
Handle mutual difficultnesses — from swarming to robbing to pesticide poisoning, find simple solutions
Understand Colony Collapse Syndrome — learn what you may do to support save the honey bees
Gear up for the golden harvest — use the tools of the trade to extract honey, store it, and trade it

Praise for Beekeeping For Dummies

“The data a beginner needs to keep bees with confidence.”
— Kim Flottum, Bee Culture Magazine

“A reader-friendly guide to beekeeping for novices or beginners.”
— Dewey M. Caron, Professor of Entomology, University of Delaware

Open the book and find:

The respective types of honey bees and the role each plays in a colony
Hands-on instruction in building a hive
How to keep bees more salubrious and more productive
Guidelines for all phases of honey production
New info on raising your own queens
Plenty of helpful, illustrative pictures to guide you
The safest ways to inspect and take pleasure in your bees
A Beekeeper’s Calendar coordinated by climate zones

Review Beekeeping For Dummies is a honey of a book on an more and more standard hobby. For both enjoyment and profit, beekeeping has become a booming enterprise. This easy-to-follow guide removes the mystery from this pastime. Realize the gains of keeping bees, from aiding the environs to enjoying homemade honey and wax products.

Beekeeping For Dummies includes detailed, full-color photographs that show how to install a package of bees in your hive, what to suppose from your bees (they are fantastically well-tempered for the duration of swarming!), and how to spot-and solve-common beekeeping problems.

Beekeeping For Dummies was written by Howland Blackiston, expert beekeeper and the president and co-owner of www.bee-commerce.com.

From the Publisher Beekeeping For Dummies is a honey of a book on an progressively general hobby. For both enjoyment and profit, beekeeping has become a booming enterprise. This easy-to-follow guide removes the mystery from this pastime. Realize the gains of keeping bees, from aiding the surroundings to enjoying homemade honey and wax products.

Beekeeping For Dummies was written by Howland Blackiston, expert beekeeper and the president and co-owner of bee-commerce.com.

From the Back Cover”The selective information a beginner needs to keep bees with confidence.” Kim Flottum, Bee Culture Magazine “A reader-friendly guide to beekeeping for novices or beginners.” Dewey M. Caron, Professor of Entomology, University of Delaware

A honey of a book on an progressively usual sideline

For both enjoyment and profit, beekeeping has become a booming enterprise. In this easy-to-follow guide, author Howland Blackiston removes the mystery from this pastime, supplying inventive solutions to numerous mutual — and not common dilemmas. Realize the gains of keeping bees, from aiding the surroundings to enjoying homemade honey and wax products. For more plain-English advice, see:

The Dummies Way^® Explanations in plain English “Get in , get out” selective information Icons and other navigational aids Tear-out cheat sheet Top ten lists A dash of humor and fun

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Most helpful customer reviews

163 of 165 people found the following review helpful.
Good for Dummies
By Paul Bridges
Keep in mind this book has a “dummies” slant. It’s a great beginner book and I own a copy. I recommend it. Lots of conversational plain english, funny cartoons, photographs, etc. But, buy another book as well to round out your knowledge. For example, Howland doesn’t explain *why* you need an inner cover… just says it’s part of the hive. He only provides *one* technique for queen introduction (albeit a good one), when there are several others. Then he perpetuates the myth that you should scrape a bee’s stinger away rather than pinch it away (Discover magazine, et. al., now dispute this), and when discussing *moving* a hive, he leaves out the “3 mile rule” and the “1 foot per day” approach, etc. He suggests using motor oil moats to prevent ants (works great), but doesn’t mention that vegetable oil and Tanglefoot work great also. Like I say, great book, buy it, but get some others too.

102 of 105 people found the following review helpful.
Beekeeping for Dummies…
By Charles Andrew Wingard
… is a good spring board into the world of beekeeping. He explains the set up of the hive, insect and disease problems, tools you may or may not need, etc. But there is little explanation as to why these things are necessary. Also, if you are familiar with the state of the honey bee, you will know that colonies are dying at a rapid rate. Howland’s book is slanted toward exploiting bees, and not just keeping them. Miticides, ordering of new queens each year, honey substitutes, and fungicides are the law in this book, and the beekeeping industry are not questioning these practices that are compounding a very serious problem, because they make money off of selling these products. I reccommend reading this book so you can understand hive setup, maintence, tools, etc.. but if you are concerned about your colonies overall health, and the health of the honey bee in general, supplement this reading with Gunther Hauk’s “Toward saving the Honey Bee”. Amazon does not offer it but you can find it on the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Assoc. website or at Acres USA. Lots of good info, and less harmful ways to handle mites etc.. and great advice on how to improve the overall health of your colony.

46 of 46 people found the following review helpful.
from a beginner beekeeper
By Leola L. Crosley
I’ve read 4 beekeeping books, I wish I would have read this one first. It’s very readable and easy-to-understand, and contained information the other harder-to-understand technical books never mentioned.