Beekeepers need enough profit margin to produce good honey

With one-ninth of the world's bee colonies, the world's highest honey production, and one-quarter of the world's total honey exports, China is truly a major beekeeping country. At the same time, China's beekeeping industry faces the awkward situation of being a “large country in quantity” but not a “strong country in efficiency”:

The China Bee Products Association investigated the prices of domestic and imported honey sold in Beijing in 2014. The average price of 1,300 domestic honey products was 35.4 yuan/500g, while the average price of imported honey was 305.5 yuan/500g, 8.6 times the average price of domestic honey.

Corresponding to this is consumers' lack of confidence in domestic bee products: “Is the honey produced by bees all fed with sugar water?”, “Is all the honey on supermarket shelves mixed with syrup?” The shift from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvement is an urgent issue facing China's beekeeping industry.

Eliminate adulteration and fraud——

Simple and feasible testing methods are needed

“Adulteration and fraud” is considered by Peng Wenjun, deputy director of the Institute of Apicultural Research of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, to be the main factor currently affecting the quality and safety of bee products and disrupting the bee product market.

The currently known methods of honey adulteration and fraud are: first, mixing large amounts of lower-cost sugars such as syrup into honey, or simply passing off syrup as honey; second, adding preservatives, clarifiers, thickeners and other additives to honey or syrup, using “honey products” to pass off as “honey”; third, when both are genuine honey, mixing low-priced honey into high-priced honey to pass off inferior goods as superior.

Honey quality testing presents a situation of “the law is one foot high, while the devil is ten feet high”——as testing methods for corn syrup and rice syrup have matured, their added amounts have gradually decreased, but the added amounts of other types of syrup (millet, cassava, sugar beet) and mixed syrups show an increasing trend.

This is related to the natural properties of honey itself. Honey itself has a sugar content as high as 80%. Apart from sugar and water, the content of minerals, vitamins, bioactive substances and other components is extremely small, but it is precisely these “extremely small” substances that are where honey's value lies. However, affected by cost and efficiency, there is currently no method that allows consumers to quickly and easily test and detect the content of honey's special components, resulting in the adulteration and fraud of honey not being effectively curbed.

Achieve high quality at a high price——

Leave enough profit margin for the production stage

From 2011 to 2014, the Ministry of Agriculture supported the construction of 13 “standardized beekeeping production demonstration” bases, carried out technical guidance and on-site demonstrations, and promoted modern standardized beekeeping production technology. However, a couple with one apprentice, migratory beekeepers who “chase flowers and seize honey” along nectar sources, remain the main providers of honey raw materials in China at the current stage.

The “seizing” of honey by migratory beekeepers is reflected not only in traveling through the four seasons chasing nectar sources, but also in many beekeepers cutting honey by the day in order to increase output, harvesting honey that should have matured and been capped in three or four days or even a week, thereby obtaining a larger total amount of immature honey, also called “water honey,” whose quality is far inferior to that of mature honey.

Naturally matured honey differs greatly from “water honey” in nutrition, flavor and active substances, but its value is not reflected in the market. Most of the profits from honey products are squeezed out by the circulation sector, leaving very little room for the beekeeping and processing stages. “High quality cannot command a high price” is the main reason why beekeepers would rather frequently spend manpower cutting honey than produce mature honey.

Recognize the social benefits of the bee industry——

Let bee products return to their true value

In May 2015, the White House issued a white paper, the “National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators,” jointly drafted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, elevating the bee industry to the level of national strategy.

Similarly remarkable in spirit, as early as 1960, when inspecting the Institute of Apicultural Research of China, Chairman Zhu De wrote an inscription: Bees are a treasure; strengthening scientific research and popularizing beekeeping can greatly increase crop yields and obtain multiple benefits.

“Bee products” are only one of the “multiple benefits” of the beekeeping industry, yet for a long time they have been treated as the main or even the entire income of beekeeping.

“The important social and ecological value of bees in increasing farmers' income, raising crop yields and maintaining ecological balance has been seriously underestimated.” This is the consensus of most bee industry researchers and practitioners.

The United States has more than 2.6 million bee colonies, nearly half of which are used to pollinate crops. Moreover, the output value generated by crop pollination is about 20 billion US dollars a year, which is 143 times the value of bee products themselves. When beekeepers provide bees to orchards and crop farmers, the income obtained from renting out pollination accounts for 50% of total beekeeping income.

⟧ In China, however, the huge green economic value of bees in increasing agricultural output and maintaining ecological balance is ignored, and migratory beekeepers face multiple pressures and risks such as nectar source land fees and bee pesticide poisoning.

Good honey requires composure. Only by letting the multiple values of the beekeeping industry be reflected, making bee products no longer the main or even the only source of economic return for beekeepers, and properly resolving the difficulties of migratory beekeepers such as public security, fees, bee product sales, bee pesticide poisoning, and human-bee safety. Only by straightening out the information communication channels and benefit distribution mechanisms between planting farmers and beekeepers can the beekeeping industry achieve healthy and sustainable development, and can the quality of bee products be guaranteed from the source.