> Backyard beekeepers (manage 50 or fewer colonies): 32.8% Sideline (manage 51-500 colonies): 31.8% Commercial (manage more than 500 colonies): 20.7%
That's not the current data. Maybe that was last year.
https://research.beeinformed.org/survey/
Current "averages" data is Backyard: 41.2%, Sideline 33.,4% Commercial: 27.7%
But this summary misrepresents the "number of colonies managed", which is key here - one cannot "average" a statistically insignificant number of values. "Hobby beekeepers" averaged 6.5 colonies each, that’s a big skew from "0-50". Sideliners averaged 139, that’s ALSO a big skew from "50-500". And Commercial... under 5K colonies? Where are all the big ops?
Backyard: 55607 responses , managed colonies averaged 6.5, winter loss averaged 40.9% to 41.5%
Sideline: 2148 responses, managed colonies averaged 139, winter loss averaged 32.3% to 34.5%
Commercial: 178 responses, managed colonies averaged 4827, winter loss averaged 26.5% to 28.9%
With only 55K hobbyist responses, it is clear that the hobbyist number consists of reports from only the BEST-PERFORMING among the hobbyists, those educated and astute enough to self-report to BIP, a small fraction of the total population. Even then, those with about 1000 times the number of hives lost about "half as many" hives, on average. Sample size matters!
With an average of only about 5K hives per op, the "commercial" average of colonies managed clearly excludes all the very largest ops, as their losses are proprietary numbers that they would never disclose at all, not even under a purportedly "anonymous" reporting scheme.
So we don't have any data from the smallest and newest hobbyists or the biggest commercial ops. But even then, the reporting hobby beekeepers, very likely including a goodly percentage of "master beekeepers", had double the losses of the "commercial" ops. Let's not hand-wave that away as incompetency, as these beekeepers are astute enough to participate in the survey, and are far less than half the total number of hobby beekeepers. Could be closer to 25% than half, dunno.
But I'm talking about the beekeepers who have yet to decide that they know it all - the ones who ask questions rather than express opinion as if it were fact. The ones still excited and happy to merely open a beehive. The ones who take joy in keeping bees. These are the beekeepers who sadly say "I did exactly what I was told, and I still lost all my hives 3 years in a row". These beekeepers were misled. They still are being misled. Make it stop.
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