from Mr Borst....'The question should be: is beekeeping profitable or not.'

Nice letter to the editor Jim but I would say that Mr Borst has hit the nail right on the head.   In my humble opinion many of the problems of the bee business at least have the potential to being addressed if their is ample profit or positive cash flow in the venture.  At the micro level a pretty large winter loss can be withstood if their is capital to quickly replace the loss.  We use to kill off 2/3 of the hives we took to the Dakota's, brought 800 back to east Texas and return to the Dakotas the next spring with 2500 and as far as I knew at the time this was fairly common commercial practice for the migratory folks of that era.  This process worked fine as long as you had capital to buy queens and feed and had the essential manpower to do the splitting.    

Your could insert 'overcapitalization during and directly after WWII' and 'the introduction of Chinese Honey in the early 1980s' into Mr Borst little time line and get a clearer economic picture of some of more serious financial problems that the bee business has encountered over the last 60 years.  

I should also mention that imho the structure of the bee business is quite different now that say it was 50 years back in that beekeeping then was about making a honey crop and now the most lucrative dollars now seems to be about pollination.

Currently the hobby crowd is adding a lot of $ to this venture.  This year I will like sell more $ in bees than I will selling honey < truthfully it has turned out to be less than average year in terms of honey production.        

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