Packer: One who buys and sells honey, usually at a profit.

Prejudice: A bias or leaning favourable or unfavourable without reason or for
some
                reason other than justice.

Pornography: Obscene writing.

        If any of these words offend you, stop reading now.
        I’m prejudiced against packers. In a couple of months they’ll
begin their annual
ritual of phoning around telling beekeepers the price of honey is going down.
They’ll sniff
out and target those who owe money and need to sell their crop. And beekeepers
are a bit
like sheep in that once the first goes through the gate the rest follow. I
am part of this
routine. I repeat what I hear. I find out the price of honey from a beekeeper,
who heard it
from a beekeeper, who heard it from a packer, and tell it to a beekeeper. This
year I’m
starting a new trend. Tell your friends- the price of honey is going up!!!

        A beekeeper in this neck of the woods has decided to become a packer. To get

shelf space, he first slashed his price. Then he threw in a free case with
every ten cases
ordered. Now I hear he is offering stores two months credit. Free enterprise
is beautiful at
a distance, but hard to take close up. Close up, we are all half starving while
waiting for
this yahoo to go broke.
        A lot of the stores I supply with honey are owned by Chinese Canadians. Every
one
of them pays for the honey upon delivery. It is not because they like to deal
in cash, some
pay by cheque. They simply don’t like to carry debt. This is in stark
contrast to some
white-owned fruit stands I supply. They have one hundred reasons why I can’t
be paid for
the next six months.
        A few years ago, I was heading off to a Canadian Honey Council meeting, and

asked a friend if he had any new jokes I could use to break the boredom. He
said “Well,
it’s not really a joke, but I heard of a new study that may interest
you. A survey has
discovered that when woman make love, their response falls into one of three
categories,
positive, very positive, or fake. In the first they say ‘ooh’ in
the second they say ‘ooh, ah’
and in the third they say ‘Oh Ted!, Oh Ted!’”. I could see
why he didn’t think it was much
of a joke but at the convention I found myself talking to a packer and decided
to run it by
him. Of course I stuck his name in the so-called punch line. He gave a little
shrug, and said
“This may all be true, but why would I care? It’s all good for
me!!” The trouble with the
beekeeping industry is that too many packers have that same attitude when buying
and
selling honey.


Ted Hancock
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