We Love our Club

We often refer people to their local bee club and strongly encourage everyone to join a local beekeeping community. The hands-on support and community cannot be replicated online. It’s been our conviction that clubs and beekeepers like us benefit from each other. I actually wrote the below a few years back but never published it… I think it summarizes our feelings on the whole thing quite well: Yes, we support our local club as best we can. And this helps us as much as them.

Marketing Honey and Educating the Public: How beekeepers and clubs win together

Written by Anna O’Connell, Steamship Bee Company, LLC, Springfield, IL

Intro 

Almost every booklet extolling the benefits of beekeeping points out that as a hobby beekeeping is rewarding on more than one level. Minimally, it allows you to generate an income sufficient to offset costs incurred for the bees, for beekeepers with a little experience and under most conditions it allows you to generate a nice supplemental income – the so-called sideliner – usually proportionate to the amount of time and effort you are investing. And for some beekeepers, my husband included, beekeeping may offer the possibility to pursue as a full-time commercial enterprise generating a healthy family income and more. 

Beyond the monetary recompense, beekeeping is the entry into a world of specialty farmers, gardeners, bee-enthusiasts all of whom share a love for the bees and a genuine admiration of these amazing creatures. Beekeepers are a community of perpetual learners and tough farmers who make fast friends with each other in the shared adventure that our hives offer us – whether that is 2 or 200. We explore these friendships in the beekeeping clubs, the ISBA, conventions, conferences, forums and more. A good time to my beekeeper is a day spent in the bee yard with a fellow “Beek” and maybe a cold beer on our front porch after to discuss what was observed in the hives. 

Beekeepers as a profession or calling is met with wonder and questions from the public and, it seems an ever-growing fascination with where food is coming from. Bee clubs know that outreach and education of the public is a part of the deal that most of us embrace – going to your kids’ and grandkids’ schools, visiting at events on food, farming, conservation and the like and chatting with the always curious reaction on hearing that you have bees “Oh wow, what’s that like?” 

The Beekeeping Business 

Beyond the immediate hobbyist beekeeper, most beekeepers generate some income from the bees. You may be a small sideliner with 5-10 hives, sales to friends and family; you may have 10-30 hives and retail through farmers’ markets or even a local store whether that is ACE hardware or the local grocer. Lastly, some of us are looking for a full-time income as a commercial beekeeper (typically 300+ hives).  

Beekeeping methods vary depending on your size of operation, your own resources and resource constraints, including time, available cash to invest, access to property with good forage, synergies with existing enterprises you are involved in. 

In any case, you still must sell your product, we will talk about honey as a stand-in for products marketed straight to consumers for consumption mostly honey, comb honey, pollen, wax and products based off that, and bees as a stand-in for products marketed to other beekeepers such as nucs, packages, queens, cells. 

There are a few realities of beekeeping here in Illinois I want to examine.

Producing locally sourced spring bees or queens are not competitive on price with southern states like Florida nor are they available as early.

The honey market competition on price is not even close to honey produced by migratory beekeepers who have their renumeration in the pollination contract and thus need to make little more than cost of transportation off their honey. And we can certainly not compete with the cheap import honey (labeled or not[1]). In addition, most local beekeepers do not have sufficient product to maintain a spot at a larger grocery chain. In simple terms, we can’t get into the retail store thus incurring a higher per-item transaction cost for the consumer who must come and find us. We will get back to this. 

On the upside, Illinois has plenty of land and a sizable agricultural sector. We have more and more prairie and other excellent forage thanks to conservation efforts and a growing number of sustainably operated farms. Some of these farmers find themselves keeping bees as well and bringing a sustainable mindset to beekeeping as well[2]. We have strong flows, and our honey is delicious. We are in the heartland with easy access to several large markets: Illinois is the 5th largest state by population with affluent metropolitan areas.

The more recent re-discovery of locally sourced, fresh quality products has ushered in a renaissance of farm stands and farmers’ markets. Seeing a mason jar with locally made jelly is a common sight in both small grocer and larger, high-end chains who are striving to differentiate themselves in the food market by meeting the demand for these quality offerings. 

When we talk about offering value for the consumer, locally sourced, raw honey offers a tremendous value to the consumer. It is therefore our job in marketing this honey from our local apiaries to help the consumer understand that value – once we can get honey tried and tasted, the honey does the job for us, of course. This is where our more personal retail experience works in our favor. 

Food culture has become more enlightened, and today’s consumers are looking for products with known origins. Honey is rightfully a hot topic in the slow food conversation[3]. We should be able to capitalize on it! 

We can and should compete on quality, and it aligns with the mission of the clubs. 

The Clubs 

The purpose of the ISBA is to promote interest in Honey Bees and Beekeeping by encouraging good beekeeping practices in Illinois, the utilization of Honey Bees for the pollination of agricultural crops and the dissemination of information about Honey Bees and beekeeping.[4] 

The pandemic has certainly highlighted that person-to-person engagement beats every other form of outreach in effectiveness and lasting impact. Clubs participate in and organize community-facing events in schools, local attractions, as part of agricultural education etc. Your club may be involved in 2-3 events interacting with a couple hundred people at each event. Your local beekeeper going to a farmer’s market on a weekly basis all summer has dozens of interactions for 10 weeks straight.

If we understand and embrace solid, truthful information about bee products, clubs and beekeepers work hand in hand effectively doubling their collective outreach efforts.

In the end, it is vital for both the local producer and the bee club to have the consumer understand the origin of their honey and the value of our locally sourced raw honey in comparison to the cheaper product sold at the big box store[5] . A jar of local honey embodies an economic contribution at the local level (the whole idea behind Shop Local campaigns), it carries the full health benefit of local pollen contained in the product and it supports locally grown foods through the incidental pollination.

If you consider it, the interaction of a beekeeper at the local farmer’s market or craft fair with their consumers is a meaningful interaction likely to leave a lasting impression. It creates word-of-mouth beneficial to the beekeeper selling his honey and is aligned with the education and outreach goals of the clubs. Everyone wins!

Succeeding together

When beekeepers and clubs work together to educate both honey and bee customers of the value of the product they are purchasing, it furthers bee education.

Our locally raised nucs cannot compete on price, but they are competitive in quality or value. Take a package for $150 vs. an overwintered nuc for $200. Failure rates on packages are by many accounts in the 50% ballpark – so the risk-adjusted[6] price is really $225 with no real expectation of honey from the package[7][8]. An overwintered nuc, rated at a failure rate[9] of 20% would come out to $240 in risk-adjusted price with a reasonable expectation to harvest honey that year leaving us solidly in the plus column.

More importantly, nucs and overwintered nucs allow us as a region to improve on the locally adapted genetics. It is indubitably the better option long-term.

On the consumer side, local, raw honey is a premium product. It’s the brand name of honey if you will or in my opinion should be! My kids have reliably informed me that Philadelphia is by far the superior cream cheese. Hellman’s is the only mayo they’ll eat. And when we don’t have our own eggs, only Rich Ramsey’s farm eggs will do![10]

When products are advertised truthfully, sellers of bees and honey win because we can charge the appropriate price for our products since are not competing on the naked price but on quality or value for money. The consumers win because they get the advertised value for their money. 

Clubs can amplify their bee education and can see better success for their members – making beekeeping more fun. I have heard that this is the number 1 goal, after all!


[1] I strongly recommend “Lawyers, Guns, and Honey”, the first episode in the Netflix docuseries “Rotten” to learn about honey laundering.

[2] We’ve been inspired in our beekeeping approach by our good friends, Rick and Kathy Kaesebier (Kaesebier Farms).

[3] https://www.slowfood.com/category/bees-and-honey/

[4] Article II of the ISBA Constitution.

[5] There are exceptions like Georgia beekeeper Bob Binnie (Blue Ridge Honey Company) who retails through Walmart for both locally sourced and purchased varietal honey.

[6] The simple risk-adjusted price calculation used here is the price of the unit after risk is accounted for. So, a $150 package is likely to fail in 50% of cases, and I really need to buy 1.5 to statistically ensure a surviving hive.

[7] https://entomology.ces.ncsu.edu/2021/04/installing-a-new-package-of-bees-heres-a-new-tip-to-improve-acceptance/ or https://works.bepress.com/james_strange/6/

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ueBGH1A7-8 Dr. Jamie Strange “What’s in a Package?”

[9] We have done very well with overwintered nucs; we usually see failure of under 10% in overwintered nucs.

[10] I should mention that we do mostly shop at Aldi and are not particularly name-brand driven except for some items where we have a clear favorite.

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