a Kristina Williams snip followed by > my comments...
 
One of my plugs for my mentoring fees is
"Well, I'm still cheaper than a new package of bees." (But maybe I can
raise my rates now)

>please do... you can witness my own rates at www.ETzzzBzzz.com

>imho ALL of agriculture has worked far too cheap for far too long and the consumer gets exactly what they pay for...  Sadly most of agriculture is what we use to define (in marketing) as a price taker and not a price maker < making or setting price does requires the producer to have a good idea of cost....

>thru the roof... I don't think so but if you want to work for slave labor wages it is a FREE country. even with these so called increased package or nuclei price the more experienced hands tell me 'you get what you pay for'... and as a consumer I tell all to ask lots of questions from the supplier and most importantly know where the bees come from... a truck load of packages that all die 3 months later is not much a value at any price. 

>as a reference I see my good beekeeping neighbor BWeaver is now selling 3# packages for $200 picked up in Navasota Texas... what is essentially a 4 frame nuclei (I sell basically the same thing in the same ez nuc box) for $325.  With 100 years of experience it hard to question that those folks do not have a good handle on what their cost are and how to translate this into the price for the end product... The Weaver in general have always been what I would call 'price makers' and I can recall the time when beekeeping folks went to howling over (I think it was Danny grandfather Roy?) increasing the price of queens from 5 to 6 dollars.

>In economic theory and now in practice there is a thing called 'opportunity cost' which basically is the idea that you can establish price by review 'the price you should have extracted' from the product given an alternate use or choice of the product..... so say a nuc or package can produce X # of honey times Y $ per pound - the variable cost of producing that honey and this would represent the 'opportunity cost' of the package or nuclei.

Gene in Central Texas   
 

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