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Dear Bee-Liners:
                My thanks to the people who have sent in queries about
commercial bumblebee production.  Please forgive me for not having time
to answer all your messages personally--in this posting I will try to
provide a global response, and will get back to you individually as soon
as time permits.
    First, the most commonly asked question was: "Why are the darned
things so EXPENSIVE"?  Part of the answer is that rearing bumblebees,
notwithstanding enormous technical advances in efficiency both here and
in Europe, is horribly labour-intensive: even under the best of circum-
stances, each colony takes many person-hours during the entire course of
its life-history.  A goodly proportion of these hours is spent on the
hive after it leaves our plant--which explains why the markup awarded to
our distributors is comparatively high.
    The North American prices are about 1/3 as much again as those in
Europe.  Part of the reason for this is, of course, that there is much
less competition this side of the Atlantic--doubtless this will change
over the next few years.  But more intractable causes for our higher
prices are to be found in the fact that the distances over which hives
must be transported in North America are vastly greater than those in
(most of) Europe, while at the same time the tiny size of the North
American greenhouse market does not allow us to benefit from the sort of
economies of scale which have made the largest of the European producers
such admirable models of industrial efficiency.  Bees-under-Glass, for
example, cannot afford the huge cost of injection-moulding--we are lucky
when we can even use vacuum-forming as a fabrication method.  Now if
only we could just find a market for a few THOUSAND bumblebee colonies
per week, instead of (at present) barely a hundred . . . (dream on,
Plowright!).
    Here, because several people have asked about them, are the most
recent data (all of them estimates and doubtless subject to error) that
I have been able to gather about the major European producers:
 
Name                  Country           No. of hives shipped per week
----------------------------------------------------------------------
KOPPERT             The Netherlands              2000 - 2500
BioBest             Belgium                      1500 - 2000
Brinkman/Bunting    The Netherlands/U.K.          200 - 250
Duclos              France                         ca. 200
BioPol              The Netherlands                20 - 30
Minor producers     Several countries              50 - 75
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    These figures were given to me recently by a friend (an employee in
one of the abovementioned companies) who was visiting from Europe.  I do
not doubt the accuracy of his information--but I may have taken the
figures down wrong, so as I said earlier, they may not all be correct.
    I also asked him for an estimate of the areas of greenhouse crops in
Europe.  Here are the figures that he gave:
          ----------------------------------------------
            Tomatoes                   4,500 hectares
            Peppers                      300 ha
            Eggplant (aubergines)         40 ha
          ----------------------------------------------
Of these, my friend said that the eggplant fraction will probably incr-
ease greatly in the future--this crop is just beginning to take off.
Good news for those who like ratatouille . . .
    Hoping that this information is useful to you . . .
    Best regards, Chris Plowright.
 
--
Chris Plowright - via the University of Ottawa
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