Another Great Year is Upon Us, Bee Brethren:

A hobbyist, now entertaining to move up to be a sideliner, I have never
given away my honey free except to my in-laws and exceptionally *special*
people around me.  To say the obvious, giving away free honey is a
dastardly disservice to another beekeeper.  Whenever I feel the urge to
give it free to someone, I try *hard* to remember the heat, the sweat, the
sting, the gas, the overhead, the backache, and the hours of free labor I
had rendered to procure the elixir.  Hence, nothing is free, and I have
been selling $10 per quart, for three years now, while the local Atwood’s
sells, I think, about $6, a fact I always remind my customers of, should
they want something cheaper.  I never negotiate my price; mine is local
while the store-bought honey ain’t.  Now I have sold all I had produced
last year except six quarts--left to my name.

To nickel and dime is counter-productive for a commercial beekeeper or
someone who produces more than a dozen barrels of honey a year.  But a
hobbyist or a small sideliner might try the old-fashioned door-to-door
sale by visiting large groups of people *with a prior appointment.* Here
are suggestions, some proven, others planning:

1. Whenever giving a bee-talk to, say, schools, police/fire
departments, and gardening clubs—-always sell your honey after the talk,
after you had *primed* them with a bee-fever-pitch.  A PowerPoint
presentation plus an observation hive should whet their appetite and wet
their tongue.  It’s even better to have your visit announced, in advance,
so that they will bring their pocket money on that day or visit on their
payday.

2. Visit the banks you deal with and often they will keep boxes of
honey and sell it to their customers for you.  A loan officer sold a case
for me, having herself bought three quarts.  [it was great to collect the
money from the bank, for once]

3. As mentioned by others, sell at your work: this practice created,
for me, many a return customer and they would ask me when my honey will be
ready in a given year.  People would button-hole me in the hall ways to
talk about the honey and my bees.  During X-mas this year, a colleague had
thought my honey would be a great gift that he bought a whole case.

4. Mainatain the swarm-retrieval data—-the date, weight, wind, temp,
height, address, phone number, email addresses, and names—so that you can
call them up when you are ready to sell.  They often think it is *their*
swarm that produced the honey!

5. Find a local factory—-the larger, the better—-and visit there and
sell.  Make your visit an annual event.  Once I took my honey to a real-
estate agency and sold a case in a week, having left it there.  Some
companies have policies against sales visit: don’t try Lowe’s or Wal Mart—-
even though their employees wanted.  Instead, pass the word around among
the employees so that they will contact you later.

6. County/State Fairs are great; so are local farmers markets.  So
are local “Old Tractor Shows” in late June.  I am planning to sell my
spring honey there this year for the first time.

7. Nursing homes and retirement homes, I found having retrieved a
swarm there once, are possibly the best place you can take your cases of
honey to sell.  These blessed folks have tasted the real thing when
growing up, especially comb honey, so that their bones ache for the
nostalgia of the past as well as the real substance of the present.

8. Most of my honey goes to a local Feed Center where they sell it at
$12.95.  [I still sell to them at $10 per quart, period]  Initially I was
shocked at their stiff price, which was almost the double of the Atwood’s
price, but the savvy manager told me, “In selling business, you never want
to start low.”  And they were selling.

9. Remember there are people who plum don’t like honey.  Don’t bother
them.


In Shawnee, Oklahoma, my bees are going at the pollen substitute like
crazy; it’s already time to *prime” my bees—-before the Big Bang about two
and a half months way.

Yoon