Robin Dartington, representing the views of
the fine old tradition of "handcrafted honey",
said:

> Jim Fischer came up with the curious view that
>
>>  "As it stands now, we consume more than we
>>  produce, and we had better be nice to our
>>  counterparts who fly different flags, 'cause
>>  without them, the supply of honey to the
>>  consumer would be about as dependable as the
>>  supply of spare parts for 1975 Bricklins".

It is only "curious" to one who continues to insist
that beekeepers need only "keep bees", and need not
concern themselves with extraneous details, like money,
or marketing.

Sadly, this is common among beekeepers, which explains
why the bulk of beekeepers are doomed to toil in (well-
deserved?) self-imposed abject poverty and absolute
obscurity, while the creators of nothing more than a
microwavable package for soup that fits into an automobile
cupholder http://www.soupathand.com have sold out to
Campbells, and retired to some tropical beach, where
they will live in luxury, and be waited upon by a staff
of 27 for the rest of their lives.

> "We" here can only mean some body that is concerned
> with continuity of supply to the USA population.
> That does not mean honey producers.

Oh, yes it >>>DOES<<< !!!!!

The reality of selling something to consumers is very
strict.  If a specific food (or brand) cannot be
obtained upon the whim of the consumer, the consumer
buys something else.  This is as true for farmer's
markets as it is for retail stores.

This is as true for the beekeeper who sells drums
as it is for the beekeeper who bottles his own honey.
The proof is that smart beekeepers will buy drums of
honey from other beekeepers, just to assure that they
can fill an order larger than their inventory.

One cannot build any sort of a "brand image", if one's
brand is not readily available for purchase.  Yes, a
micro-producer can always sell his or her 100 jars or
even 4000 jars of honey a year with no trouble at all
on a catch-as-catch-can basis, but this is little more
than a "lemonade stand" operation. The larger your
operation, the more important it is to be a consistent
player at the wholesale and/or the retail level.

At the high-volume end of the market, a lack of honey
could shut down a production line, screw up shipping
schedules, and frustrate a promotional campaign (like
a "cents-off" coupon or an ad).  In a worst-case scenario,
it could cause the food processor to stop buying honey
at all.

  Why do you think I used the Bricklin as an example?
  Note that there is no longer a Bricklin in my garage.
  There was at one time, and I loved the ugly little
  thing.  But a constant scavenger-hunt for parts,
  insufficient to support regular rally competition,
  prompted me to sell a true "investment grade"
  highly-collectable car with acceleration that could
  untie your sneakers. If you can't drive it every
  day, it is NO LONGER A CAR.  Its an expensive paperweight.
  It is "sculpture".  It may be nice, but it isn't a car.

It follows that if you can't buy honey every day, or at
least any day you want to, it is no longer "food".
It becomes a "delicacy", an obscure item.

But it is only YOUR honey which remains obscure.  Other
people's honey is available more readily.  Guess which
one people remember and develop "brand loyalty" for?

> Surely the business of honey producers is to only produce
> pure honey and to sell it in a way that ensures the product
> reaches customers in a fit and proper condition.

The situation created by producers who wear blinders to the
rest of the supply chain is one of the big reasons why people
like Bob are so angry at packers, brokers, importers, exporters,
and apparently, even some overseas producers he has never met.

Here's what happened, in summary:

a) In the 1950s, US Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson
   said to farmers, "Get big, or get out."  He said this because
   he saw that increasing mechanization would "obsolete" the
   small field in favor of the larger field.  Since the twin
   technologies of hybrid crops and fully mechanized farming
   both increased yields and reduced labor, he was NOT being
   "mean".  He was trying to tell small farmers to sell out
   before they went bust trying to sell their higher-cost crop
   in competition with "lower-cost producers" who used hybrids
   and (expensive) mechanical equipment, producing larger crops
   at a lower price per unit.

b) The result was that the typical US family pays less for better
   food (as a percentage of income) than just about anyone, anywhere
   at any time in the history of man.  Hybrid crops also assure
   more consistent yields, and the yields are improving all the
   time.  That's why the US can dispatch a few C-5 Galaxy
   (or C-17 Globemasters, C-141s, whatever) heavy-lift aircraft
   loaded with food within HOURS to any point on the planet for
   the victims of the latest natural disaster, and back it up
   with a stream of container ships that make the supply convoys
   of World War II look like a Sunday regatta at the lake.

c) The downside for producers is that the technology of "increased
   yields" and "increased harvests" drives down price per unit,
   squeezing out not only those who fail to invest in the new
   technologies, but also those who fail to expand to some minimum
   size required to use the technology efficiently, and pay for the
   technology with the profits from a lower price per unit of food.

Alongside all of the above, we have honey, which can only be described
as being locked in a time-warp.  Still produced in the time honored
old-world tradition by quaint-looking fellows in funny costumes lifting
one 60-lb super at a time onto their rickety trucks, and dumbfounded at
the concept of anything more advanced than a stainless-steel extractor.
Even a demo of a simple mechanized uncapper at a beekeeper meeting STILL
attracts amazed attention.  It is such a sad situation that US firms like
Cowan and Maxant are STILL "technology leaders", even though their designs
have remained essentially unchanged for decades.

But the "technology" that drove down honey prices was not "our" technology,
which is why beekeepers lost the upper hand, if they ever had it.
The containerized shipping system suddenly allowed buyers of honey to play
beekeepers against each other on a true global scale.  Needless to say, if
someone is willing to accept a lower standard of living than you, they will
be able to sell all the honey they care to produce, while you may not be able
to find a buyer at all.

But beekeepers wear blinders on their veils, and it has always been thus.
I forget which old beekeeping book it was, but I recall the story of a
beekeeper who wanted to sell his honey to the local General Store, somewhere
in the midwest USA:

   The merchant picked up the newspaper, and looked up the
   price of honey in Chicago (where the commodities markets
   were, and still are), and then took that price quote, and
   SUBTRACTED the price of shipping the honey from Chicago.

   That was the merchant's offer - take it or leave it.
   "Sell to me for cash today below the Chicago price,
   or ship your honey to Chicago, at your own expense,
   and take your chances that the price might go down."

   While the merchant might have to buy honey at the "Chicago"
   price, and also pay the shipping from Chicago to have honey
   on his shelf, he was a HONEY BUYER, so his primary goal was
   to secure a regular supply from a docile producer who was
   willing to accept such an "offer", or too lazy to consider
   any other alternative.  He also knew that as long as he held
   firm in his outrageous demands, someone would shrug his shoulders
   and accept the offer as "fair".  (Back then, there were more
   beekeepers, so the odds were in the merchant's favor.)  It was
   a BLUFF!  The beekeeper had (and still has) choices.  Why do
   you think so many farmers of grain have their own silos?

   (If anyone remembers which book this was, please post the
    title.  It was the personal recollections of a beekeeper
    who started keeping bees as a boy, and kept at it for his
    whole life.  I have the book somewhere, or lent it to
    someone, I don't know.)

> My interest in this - as a UK onlooker - stems from my
> off-sung song that the true significance of honey is that
> it is a medicinal product

You might be able to get away with that in the UK.  Here in the
US, making such claims without solid proof is a great way to get
yourself fined within an inch of your life by the US Food and
Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and state-level
consumer-protection agencies.

  (What a country! We have one federal agency making sure
  we eat good food, and have access to mood-altering substances
  of a chemical nature, ( http://www.fda.gov ) and another
  insuring that we have access to high-quality alcohol, strong
  tobacco, and semi-automatic firearms ( http://www.atf.gov )

> We - beekeepers - will only make progress on this when we start
> to value the product ourselves and stop supplying it to be mucked
> about and sold in competion with foriegn rubbish.

Well, what happens when someone who shares your point of view, but not
your flag, dismisses YOUR crop as "foreign rubbish"?  What happens is
that beekeeper has turned against beekeeper, when the problem clearly
is NOT "too many beekeepers".  This plays directly into the hands of
the buyers of honey, whose only trick is to play one producer against
the other, and see which one cracks under the pressure first.  It also
distracts beekeepers from the business at hand, and keeps them a
disorganized rabble, squabbling among themselves so loudly than none
of them even hear the money changing hands all around them.

Now that technology has "leveled the playing field" planetwide for any
food you care to name, and no one beekeeper has any technological "edge"
over another, one is forced to resort to "marketing" that is slightly
more sophisticated than childish name-calling.

For most beekeepers, this means renting or buying a bottling line, and
coming up with a brightly-colored label, a "brand name", and some kind
of a "theme".

Peter Bray has mastered all of this, which is why I can drive down the
road a mere 40 miles, and buy a jar of HIS honey year-round.
"Airborne Honey" is ALWAYS there on that shelf, right next to mine.
He has turned the simple fact that he is in New Zealand into a "cachet
of exclusivity", and has somehow convinced some number of people to buy
HIS (not very remarkable) honey rather than mine.  Good for him!  My hat's
off to you Peter! I stand in admiration of your grasp of marketing, and
wish you would produce a series of books and video tapes to instruct the
rest of us.

It also means that beekeepers need to stop making claims that
they can "taste the difference" between honey that was uncapped
with a hot knife and extracted versus honey that has been
squeezed through a ladies stocking, and start thinking long
and hard about how to STOP USING LADIES STOCKINGS in the
handling of FOOD!!  :)

  While I'd love to test these claims with an actual blind
  taste test in front of a large number of beekeepers, the
  mere fact that someone BRAGS about a method of preparing
  honey for the consumer that apparently involves the use of
  ladies undergarments implies that, as a group, beekeepers
  are suffering from self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the foot
  every day.  We have met the real enemy, and it is our own
  complete and utter lack of a clue that we dealing with food,
  and not just cute, interesting, and highly entertaining insects.

> Would not organising a federation of smaller honey co-ops be less
> work - and less frustrating - than campaigning for all the
> legislative changes to labelling regulations that Bob was wondering
> about?

Uh, yeah... but I've been saying that for a while, and
nobody ever makes any encouraging sounds that might prompt
me to assign tasks to my staff, allocate resources, register
as a co-op with the federal government and print up membership
cards.  Perhaps it is not my place to presume to start such a
group. There are certainly better "leaders" out there.

I would think the leaders of such an effort would be "too
small" to qualify for "Sue Bee" membership, but large
enough to be forced to pay a "National Honey Board" (or
perhaps "Bored", given their promotional efforts) assessment,
and watch their money be frittered away on "recipe cards"
and other ineffective and cobweb-covered "marketing strategies"
from the 1950s.

I would also suggest that the focus of any such co-op would
NOT be to handle the crop in any way, but to create a brand
name and a logo that producers who met certain criteria for
quality (regardless of size) could use on their label, and
thereby leverage the national advertising done by the "co-op".
(Similar to the highly effective "Florida Orange Juice"
promotional work we have all seen.)  Needless to say, there
would also have to be a small amount of talking with elected
officials, as the group would promote only domestic honey,
and this would imply an interest in things like accurate
county-of-origin labeling.

I keep hoping that one of the existing US bee organizations
would take this on, but this is a dream similar to hoping that
the various US bee organizations would stop acting like childhood
treehouse clubs ("No Girls Allowed!") viewing each other as
"competitors" to be "opposed", rather than as friends who share
many common agendas and goals.

What's the difference between a US bee organization and a street gang?
The street gang members show more loyalty to each other, and dress with
more style.


        jim

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