"The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to
choose from."
(Quote wrongly attributed to Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, actually a quip made
by Charles (Charlie) Brown, pre-divestiture president of AT&T)

There are some standards for important metrics in the various COLOSS books
http://www.coloss.org/beebook
These are oriented toward research practices, but they are an excellent set
of examples of useful standard that could easily be extended into a more
complete set of standardized practices of to which beekeepers could
subscribe, if any beekeeper was willing to openly subscribe to "standards"
set by others, something I tend to doubt.

> Being willing to take honey that's not capped 
> is a portion also, get out of the mindest that if 
> its not capped its not ready.  
> Many times it ready but they don't cap.

I tried this for a few seasons, and your labor cost is the primary factor
here.

We would pull honey based upon refractometer readings, thus saving the bees
the work of capping, and reducing our work of uncapping somewhat.  But this
was only possible with low-cost teenage labor, as we could not make
box-at-a-time choices, we had to leave some frames on the hives, and come
back for a second harvest on each yard.  If you wait until you have a
consistently less-than-18% box, so that you can "pull supers" rather than
"pull frames", much comb is already capped.

As most of my employees came to me with "references" from the local juvenile
judge, I felt obligated to give them as many hours of honest labor as they
wanted to work, but this tactic was NOT a big advantage unless we had
perfect weather, and we could pull all but a tiny fraction of the honey on a
hive in that first (early) harvest.  I even talked up this approach to hobby
beekeepers ("Harvest Early, Harvest Often"), but it was an, at best,
marginal effort for a business interested in making a good profit. 

Just to throw a monkey wrench into the works, the Only Standards that
doubled the price of roughly 1/3 of my honey was Demeter Standards for
Biodynamic Beekeeping.  Demeter certification was almost unheard of outside
Germany at the time, but this simply made the cachet that much more valuable
in the eyes of the health food stores that clamored for my honey.  These
standards had (and still do have) very little to do with keeping healthy
bees, and were more an overt rejection of "modern agriculture practices"
than anything else, but by following a few utterly superfluous and often
comical "rules", my honey commanded double the price of "conventional"
honey, and enjoyed solid year-round demand from enthusiastic buyers.

Did I for a moment believe any of the mystical mumbo-jumbo of "Biodyamics"?
Not a bit of it!  Did I follow the standards?  To the letter!  




	

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