The article analyzes the fishing activities of burghers in the cities of the Tomsk province of the Russian Empire in the pre-reform period. Consideration is given to its general diversity. The article reveals the peculiarities of bourgeois beekeeping in the townships of South-West Siberia. The author addresses to such issues as a way of bee keeping, product quality, profitability of beekeeping, the problems the middle class faced in the industry. It is stated that philistine beekeeping was at a low stage of its development, as the honey production was carried out in a primitive way. The paper also presents evidence of such types of activities as fishing, hunting, and gathering. The most common among them was fishing. The article gives a detailed methodology for hunting activities of the Narym townspeople, as well as methods of fishing. It was shown that there was uneven development of the activity of the provincial areas and scale of activity depended on the climatic, geographic and socio-economic conditions of living. Beekeeping was more common in the Tomsk region and the Altai mining district, hunting and fishing were popular in the northern cities of the Tomsk province, particularly in Narym.