Every apiary purchase — hive bodies, extractors, a bee suit, a vehicle rack — loses value over time while still needing repair, replacement parts and consumables. This tower turns that arithmetic into a walkable 3D chart: one column cluster per year, showing the equipment's shrinking book value, the cumulative total cost of ownership (TCO), and the cumulative revenue the colonies generate.
UK beekeepers can typically claim capital allowances on qualifying equipment, meaning the accounting depreciation shown here often diverges from what's deductible for tax — always worth checking with an accountant once a hobby apiary becomes a registered business.
A 3D cost tower that turns apiary bookkeeping into columns you can walk around: equipment book value shrinking with depreciation, cumulative total cost of ownership climbing with upkeep, and cumulative honey revenue racing to overtake it.
Each year gets three linked bars — remaining book value, cumulative TCO, and cumulative revenue — so you can see exactly when growing income crosses accumulated spend, marked by a glowing payback beacon on the ground plane.
Set the equipment investment, hive count, per-hive revenue and upkeep, then switch between straight-line and declining-balance depreciation to see how the accounting method reshapes the book-value bars without changing the payback year.
Declining-balance depreciation front-loads the expense, which is why many small operators favour straight-line for its predictability — even though the underlying equipment often loses real resale value fastest in its first couple of seasons.