>>935416You'd be looking at a couple hundred for a langstroth and another couple hundred for a good European honey brood (or you set the hive out with some raw comb in it and cross your fingers). You could spend a fortune on a hotknife, a centrifuge, a smoker, a complete bee suit, ect. but if you like my top bar design, that'd basically be free; because you're not doing all that other crap that commercial growers do to eek out an extra 5% more honey. You just pull out one or two bars, break the whole comb off into a bucket, put the bars back and close the hive up. You probably wouldn't even need to suit up for that, but I'd still recommend smoking them first. The actual processing with a top bar is just mashing up comb and filtering out the wax (or you can eat the comb whole).
Temperature and humidity are mostly issues because of how commercial grows work. As long as you don't constantly move the hives and feed them processed sugar, they'll stay pretty healthy on their own if they sit calmly in the shade. It's kind of like asking how to regulate the amount of pesticide you have in your soil when you plan on gardening organically; it's just not something you'll have to worry about.
Plants are going to be pretty much the same, a healthy hive will travel several miles to find good pollen, it's only when they're restricted to commercial monocultures that they'll use plants that are toxic to try to make up the losses.
Subsequent generations will swarm if the population is high enough (which will happen if it's a healthy hive). Having a free hive for them to take over will make the swarm end quickly, otherwise you either have to control the numbers (which isn't healthy for them) or they'll find someplace that you didn't intend on them going like a random hollow or maybe an attic (which isn't healthy for you).
