2014 Honey Survey BBKA News

Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
so did you all register? surely if only %10 registered then they will have taken an average overall which is why it will look low? yes some people will have had a great year, but many will not, so it will be an average overall surely?

I meant that 'over 20,000' beekeepers are registered with bbka and that a survey consisting of 2000 beekeepers only represents 10% of the bbka membership.

I suppose if the 10% was made up of first time beekeepers and poor beekeepers then I could understand the results. I am a Greater London beekeeper and although don't know all the beekeepers in London I have yet to meet one who will admit to a bad year I know they are not lying as the smile on their face is proof enough. I may be wrong bit I think you are invited to take part or they then select a random 2000 entries for the survey.

All registered bbka members are invited to take part afaik as I received an email asking me to take part on 18th September.

How many actually bothered and then how many they used I do not know.

I know there will be a very wide variation in honey yields between beekeepers even in the same area. I know personally of a beekeeper very near to me that hasn't joined an association and keeps his hives in his back garden and I offered him some help and advice earlier this year. He took 20-30 lbs from 2-3 hives and was over the moon with his crop!
So when you take into account beekeepers like him then even if some take a good crop the overall average will come down.
 
I like figures but it's easy to get the wrong impression when you take an average.

I had 10 production colonies this year, the worst colony produced approx 50lbs of honey and the best 190lbs.
A swarm I caught on 19th June produced 20lbs of Summer honey!

So it's easy to see that there is a great variation from my 91lbs average.
That is across 10 colonies now imagine you have just 1-2 colonies that swarm at the wrong time.

** I think what you can take from the survey is that Honey yields on average are up. **

Stating the obvious!
 
Last edited:
I'm not that experienced myself and still find that with each year comes the opertunity to learn how to improve my beekeeping and therefore, given decent forage / weather, my Honey crop!



Chances are you know more than I as I'm fairly new to this. The difference may be forage. I live bang in the middle of 3 main forage areas, including 'nature reserve', woodland and park land. (Sounds good, but it is just an ordinary build up area with these areas surrounding my house)
I keep everything as simple as possible (no 'fancy' techniques of swarm control, for instance) and just 'help' the bees with anything they need rather than try and 'steer' them in a direction. (RAB's principal of KISS).
I put it down to ideal conditions of forage and that I let the bees guide me rather than me guide them. I'd be interested in anyone's opinion. :)
 
...I had 10 production colonies this year, the worst colony produced approx 50lbs of honey and the best 190lbs.
A swarm I caught on 19th June produced 20lbs of Summer honey!...
I think that's where the statistical fluffiness lies. Over 60% of responses are in the 1 to 4 colonies bracket. And the count of colonies is as at the end of September. The average is including any colonies about to be joined, any new from splits or nucs this year, any nucs you're expecting to overwinter.

The responses are heavily weighted to new members, because that's always who answers any surveys. First years down a little this year, but still a lot of self selection bias. Most, I guess, will have taken advantage over the year to expand. I know I have new colonies and nucs to take through the winter. Not productive yet, but all would be in a "BBKA average".

Just asking around and general impression is if you took colonies that started the summer, you could double the BBKA average of honey taken. And that's not intensively managed colonies for honey, no OSR, no farm crops. And this year, no autumn feeding because they stuffed the comb themselves, so there's 40-50 pounds of honey on the hives not in the average. The numbers don't mean a lot but statistically at least the methodology is much the same year by year. So this year, honey yield is better than last and that was better than the year before which most estimate as the worst in years.
 
I recorded 11 colonies: six were near new so had no crop and of the remaining five I harvested one. Left honey on the others...So average yield per colony was 5 lbs...
 
Last edited:
I bet that was not the only hive like that this year Geoff I hag a couple not far off and very tall. Most people I talked to this summer could hardly keep up with the bees. I was helping a friend and we were putting two supers on the hives at a time and they were getting filled in a couple of weeks.
?

Tom, think it is proper husbandry practices that gives the yield, that same apiary was given up by the previous beekeeper (Wedmore follower and shook swarm addict) and he never returned much honey, if any in some years, it caught us out the first year so we bought extra supers but last year anything that held a frame was pressed into action
 
So i guess theres no point in people bleeting about poor statistics if they dont bother to send in their details, yes us newbies probably are the ones sending in their details, shame on the others that dont & then complain about the results. As far as i can see it as a "newbie" the BBKA are trying to help us & the Bees. Ive seen this in other interests with other bodies, if people dont take part it will fall apart !
 
So i guess theres no point in people bleeting about poor statistics if they dont bother to send in their details, yes us newbies probably are the ones sending in their details, shame on the others that dont & then complain about the results. As far as i can see it as a "newbie" the BBKA are trying to help us & the Bees. Ive seen this in other interests with other bodies, if people dont take part it will fall apart !

well i did the survey, so if BBKA removed mine then London yields would be even lower LOL , there is a problem in the very heart of London with forage but not in the outer Boroughs, London is a big area and LBKA only cover the inner areas

you also have to remeber the BKF is not representative of BBKA members as few of us either Left the BBKA forum, where harrassed off the BBKA forum or have no access as not BBKA members
 
Last edited:
from what ive just seen they divide the crop taken by the amount of colonies also registered, so if some colonies don't take any crop this will make the figures lower. I think some people here may have had good crops but how much of that is made from syrup they have fed just to get more honey?

I would hope nobody feeds syrup to "make" honey. It's a complete no no and it's not legal to sell it. No beekeeper I know would entertain this.

Cazza
 
Hi guys and gals,
Just got the December edition of the BBKA News. Typical curate's egg.
Couple of examples of poor proof-reading in the article about the 2014 Honey Survey. Irritating but insignificant, has the author not heard of the rule of thumb that it's, " 'i' before 'e' except after 'c' "? ["yeild"].
More significantly, table 3 is labelled, "The factor having the largest effect on honey quality" - but the text says these data relate to the question, "what factor has the greatest effect on honey quantity?". [My italics.]An important difference, I think. Can anyone clarify this? Dusty

Spelling error that gets my goat most of all is when separate is misspelt. Schools don' bother with spelling and grammar these as PC spellchecks will do the job automatically - if you like the US dictionary of course!!!!
 
So i guess theres no point in people bleeting about poor statistics if they dont bother to send in their details, yes us newbies probably are the ones sending in their details, shame on the others that dont & then complain about the results. As far as I can see it as a "newbie" the BBKA are trying to help us & the Bees. Ive seen this in other interests with other bodies, if people dont take part it will fall apart !
It's not a complaint about poor statistics, it's a complaint about the way they are gathered and presented. As it happens I did the survey, but I know what was entered was at best only a partial reflection of how productive the season had been.

Start with the idea of who responds. Two fundamental ways of getting an accurate number. One is to record the whole population, the other is to sample. Recording the whole population of beekeepers isn't practical, around 20-50% depending on area and who's estimating are not members of any association. As we see, even among the association there are 24,000 members, under 2,000 responses. About 8%. Could be higher with more campaigning, but would doubling the number help? Not really, because the sample is still biased. If you do try to record the whole population, there are always those who refuse to respond. Even with legal sanctions, such as car registration or national census, it's never 100% accurate. So we're left with sampling which can work, but it has to be carefuly constructed. Putting out an open invitation for anyone to contribute is not a random sample. It's a basic flaw of many of the "surveys" reported in newspapers. The term is "self selected" which is effectively only thse who readily respond are counted, either because they respond to any survey or they are enthusistic beginners (nothing wrong with that) or they are proud of what they have achieved. Again nothing wrong with wanting to record your good yield, but do those with poor yields want to reveal that? It's a built in bias.

There are ways of accurate sampling. One is to take a few beekeepers with a genuinely random selection method and put a lot of effort into getting a complete response record. That's how most ONS surveys work. Another is to follow a select number of volunteers year by year and compare one year with the next - not so much an idea of overal yield but potentially accurate on how it varies. It's how some BTO surveys work, for instance sampling the same farmland year after year.

The other big question is within the numbers requested. The flaw is asking how many colonies a beekeeper has at the end of the season and dividing total honey by that. As they admit, 22% of responses are from starters and previous years have seen as high as 40%. Will a bought in nuc, a donated swarm or a split colony yield as high as an established hive? Of course not. It takes time to build the numbers and they have to be available when the maximum foraging potential is available. Building new wax frames takes a lot of energy in the form of consumed honey, most books suggest to produce 1 pound of wax bees reduce honey production by around 7 pounds.

Honey is not the only measure of production. Total yield for a beekeeper is what they end the year with in terms of honey, colonies (including those sold on or given away) and other products such as wax minus what they started with. Many professional bee farmers make more from breeding and selling bees than they do from extracted honey. In other words, it doesn't matter how many respond if the wrong questions are asked.

The overall problem is not that the survey takes place, or even how it's constructed. The real problem is that it's presented to the news outlets and to members as definitive statistics in BBKA publicity. It's an informal survey that can use the same methods as a rough guide to increased or decreased honey production year by year. That's fine, but don't present it as anything more.

As a generally readable introduction to media treatment of surveys try the book "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre.
 
from what ive just seen they divide the crop taken by the amount of colonies also registered, so if some colonies don't take any crop this will make the figures lower. I think some people here may have had good crops but how much of that is made from syrup they have fed just to get more honey?

Theoretically, 'none' if the keeper has any wit about him or her. When I say none, there is always a chance that the bees have moved some left over 'feed' from last season into the super, but that should be minimal if the keeper has kept his eye on his apiary. If a keeper was feeding sugar to produce 'honey' then it's easily checked by the ratio of levo and dextro rotationary readings of polarized light from a sample. (Not something you could do at home, granted.)
:cool:
 
Very well put alanf and good post explained it much better than I could ever hope to do.
 
2000 responses is more than enough, a hundred would probably do it. However, the responses need to be representative of the population. If they aren't representative, then 2000 certainly isn't enough. Professional political pollsters go to great lengths to ensure their typically ~1000 people are representative of the whole voting population - and then correct of known biases.

In this case it seems BBKA haven't done anything clever, and are just using data from the 2000 responses? This is fraught with danger and there are likely to be multiple selection biases going on. Are older or younger folk more likely to reply? Inexperienced or experienced? People believing themselves to have with a good yield or poor... etc

A better indication of the season's yield might be obtained by just a few dozen well selected and managed to prescribed criteria hives over the country.
 
On one page they talk about 2000 and on another they talk about 1823 from England, Wales, N Ireland and Scotland but due to small sample size N Ireland and Scotland were not included. I guess the missing numbers represent N Ireland and Scotland? I bet far more people than the 2000 filled in this survey and the BBKA then selected to get down to the sample.
 
AlanF

!00% agree - and envy your literacy!

imo the main flaw in the methodology is dividing honey harvest by 'number of hives in September' which takes no account of swarm control / new colony creation procedures.

Interesting thread

richard
 
All I know is I filled in the 2013 survey but not in 2014. On the sample sizes mentioned my 2013 return from 300 colonies would have accounted for the whole of the Midlands honey production, so I can only assume they didn't include it, perhaps because it was outside the "normal" range. Whatever filtering techniques they are using give a totally false picture in my view. Bear in mind BBKA are now into PR, and being able to claim we are nowhere near the historical 40lb average is a useful argument to prove bees are still in trouble and need government and public support.
 
statistically at least the methodology is much the same year by year

One thing that has changed is counting numbers of colonies in the autumn AFTER the honey crop to be averaged. Historically your average was always the total yield divided by the colonies you put into the previous winter. With colony numbers increasing year on year for several years that is a significant difference.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top