When Will It Stop? The Rising Cost Of Beekeeping

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the rising cost of beekeeping, break it down from everything from beehives to sugar to diesel. So I just cannot get over the increases that we have seen over the past, say, 5 to 7 years. I remember going back, you could buy a full Payne's beehive for around £60, you could buy a full Maysmoor poly nuc for under £20, and we were paying less than £1 per litre for diesel. In this video, I'm going to break it down into the top 10 cost impacts that we're seeing as a business and the rising cost across the whole of the beekeeping sector. So first one I want to talk about is beehives, and I alluded a little bit to this in the intro, but I remember you could get a full Payne's poly hive for around £60. That was a floor, a brood box, a queen excluder, 2 supers, a crown board, and a roof. £60 including the VAT. And I always used to say to people Poly hives are amazing because they're so well insulated and they are so, so cheap as well. That has completely gone now. You used to be able to get a Maysmore poly nuc for less than £20. It was so, so cheap to pick up like 50, 60 nucs at once, make up some nucs, and overwinter them as an insurance policy to make sure that you had enough bees going through the winter. Wooden hives as well have really gone up a lot over the past few years, but nowhere near as much as their poly hive equivalent. So if I had to estimate a rough cost increase for beehives, I would say polyhives over the last 5 years, you're talking around a 100% increase in cost. And then wooden hives, you're probably talking around a 50% increase in cost. Has that influenced my choice in terms of which beehives I would buy going forward? Definitely has. I've always said, for me personally, I much prefer a polyhive. I like the insulation value that it gets, but there are some downsides as well in that it might not last quite as long as a good quality cedar hive. and that it's not quite as durable. Now you look at them and you compare the two and you say one's a lot more expensive than the other one. I would still prefer to have polyhives. I think they are a superior product compared to the wooden ones, but you've always got to take the cost into account, and I think that's swayed my decision a little bit now. And I think you'll see more and more companies offering a range of different wooden beehive products because the cost of polyhives, it just isn't slowing down. And I predict for 2022 and into 2023 With the price of oil the way that it's going, the price of poly is just going to track that upwards. It's a very energy-intensive process. It's an oil-based product. So I think we're going to be well into the region of around £200 per poly hive going into 2023. Next one I got on my list is honey extraction equipment, and I just cannot believe the cost increases that we are seeing here. I remember when I bought all of my equipment, my uncapper, my extractor, I thought at the time, wow, these are so expensive. These are big capital expenditure costs that are going to pay for themselves over the years. And I even remember doing a previous video saying it's one of my top 10 beekeeping mistakes was buying all of that equipment early and not having the throughput to actually justify the costs. Looking back on that now, oh my God, what an incredible decision it was to actually put that cash up front, make the investment, because the costs have gone wild when it comes to honey extraction equipment. Especially good quality fully stainless honey extraction equipment. That is tracking the price of stainless steel, which is just getting completely out of control. Do I see that one slowing down? Nope, I see the opposite. I see it getting worse and worse going into 2023. It's going to track that price of stainless steel. The prices are definitely going upwards. The next big cost for us is the cost of fuel. We've got a pickup truck, so we're reliant on diesel to get us around. We will move at some point over to a fully electric solution. I've seen the Rivian pickup trucks and I've always kind of thought, I'm happy to put the money into an investment like that even though it's going to cost quite a lot at the beginning. I can write it off in terms of tax, and also it's going to become a cheap way for me to move around that's really green and environmentally friendly. Bit of a caveat on that now. I think all of these electric vehicles— people who have committed to electric vehicles over the past, say, 2 or 3 years With the current electricity price, are going to be paying so, so much per mile. It's either going to be around the equivalent of the petrol or diesel engines, or in some instances it might actually cost more to run them as a fully electric vehicle. Hoping the cost of electricity is definitely going to come down in the future, and I'm hoping the cost of fuel— so petrol and diesel— is also going to come down in the near future as well. That's probably me hoping. I think we're in for £2 a litre for diesel in the short term though. The next one is one of the biggest costs that impacts us at Black Mountain Honey, and that is the cost of jars and lids. The costs have gone through the roof. So you're talking in the region of around 30 to 40% cost increase on the jars, and then on the lids, we've seen a cost increase of around 75%. I put a lot of money into this one because when the costs were fixed for last year, I said, right, I'm just gonna buy a big batch of jars and lids to see me through as long as I can get. And I was totally restricted by the amount of space that I had. I bought 20,000 jars and lids for all of them. I think that will see me through around 18 months, and then once we run out of those jars, we are in for a big, big shock when it comes to buying the fresh batches of material. And the only thing that can happen with that is we're going to have to pass on some increases in terms of the amount that we charge for our honey. Next up is paying people, so labour. Luckily, at Black Mountain Honey, it's just me. I don't pay myself anything, so I haven't got to worry about that. But this is going to be really impacting a lot of bee farming businesses. The National Insurance rise has gone through, the National Insurance employer rise has gone through, there's increases in pensions as well, National Living Wage, National Minimum Wage has gone up as well. It's becoming very, very expensive to get labor in. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, that's not me moaning, that's just me including it as an increased cost that the business will need to take account of. And if we do go forward and recruit anyone into the business, labor costs are going to have to be taken into account. Because they're going to be substantial going forward. The next one I'm going to talk about is going to events. So I get asked all the time, do you want to come along and take a stall here? Or we've got a winter market, do you want to come along and have a 3-day winter market? And I remember a few years ago it really wasn't that expensive to go to some of these events. They might charge like £50 a day, or for some of the higher profile ones, like £200 or £300 a day. And some of the ones that I've seen come through recently, the price has gone through the roof. And I think these companies are trying to kind of take into account all of their additional costs, but also trying to claw back some of the money that they may have lost when we were going through COVID. Our decision at Black Mountain Honey to mitigate these cost increases, unfortunately, is that we're doing no live events. None of them at all, full stop. No little market stalls, no winter markets. For us, it's a bit of a time issue. I'd prefer to spend my weekends doing something else, but also in terms of the return on investment. When you're paying £200 or £300 a day to have a stall, and by the time you've paid for your diesel to get there and you've sorted everything out and you've factored actually in your time to go and do it, you need to be shifting quite a lot of honey to make that worthwhile. And I'd kind of prefer to spend that money maybe doing some online advertising and just do a little bit of a promotion on a certain website product and see if we can get the return on investment that way. So the cost of the events has gone up, and that has led me to make the decision that we will no longer attend Next one I want to talk about is energy. So we spoke specifically about fuel, the diesel increases, but we actually use quite a lot of electricity in our operation. When you're using the honey extractor, the honey warming units, they're very, very energy intensive. When I have them on, they're kind of drawing between like 2 and 3 kilowatts, and when you have them on for an extended period of time, the costs really do rack up quite quickly. I can't see that changing anytime soon. You know what energy companies are like. As soon as they get any costs, they pass them on. As soon as they get any savings, they kind of say, ah well, we're not going to pass those costs on to you. So at the moment we're paying like 30p a kilowatt hour. I can't see it ever really going back down below 30p a kilowatt hour. And as soon as you get into that October price cap rise, you know it's going up towards 40p a kilowatt hour. That's going to have a massive impact on some of the bigger, more commercial bee farmers out there. It's a very, very energy-intensive business. And all of those costs do need to be passed on to the consumer. And it doesn't look like there's much flexibility in terms of the actual end selling cost for honey, which brings me nicely onto the next section. So honey, whether you're buying honey in bulk, whether you're selling it by the jar, there needs to be a major shift in terms of the price of honey as a commodity. All of those factors that I've just discussed there, so we're talking about the diesel costs, the electricity costs, the fuel costs, the cost of beehives, the cost of frames and equipment and foundation, all of them have gone up, let's say, as an average around 50%. There is no way that honey as a commodity can absorb a price increase like 50%. So if you're selling your jar of honey for £6 or £7, there's no way you can just go overnight and up it to £10 and think nobody's going to notice or that people will continue to buy that product. So what I envisage seeing is that the bulk price of honey will go up a little bit. The farmers will want to put a little bit onto their price just to cover their costs, but what they definitely don't want to do is sit there on lots and lots of honey and have no one buying it. Ultimately, it comes down to what people are willing to pay. So I think there'll be a little bit of movement in terms terms of the bulk price of honey. In terms of the final selling price to the public, I think again there'll be a little bit of an adjustment, but I think we're already at pretty much a saturation point where there's lots of different honey on the market. You can buy honey from all over Europe on Amazon and eBay. You can buy cheap Chinese honey, if you want to call it honey, in the supermarket for like 50 or 60p a pound. It's gonna be very, very difficult to increase that cost, that final selling cost of honey to the consumer, by anything more than say around 10%, I would So then the final one on my list is nucleus colonies and queens. The cost of those is definitely going up as well because they take into account all of the other factors that I've spoken about. So nucs, you're talking you've got frames in there, you've got wax, you've got quite a lot of sugar feed in there, you've got a mated queen in there, you've got a polyhive in there as well. You've also got to go around and tend to all of these hives as well, all the way through the summer and then into winter. You rack up quite a big diesel bill going around and doing all of these separate hives. All of that is without a doubt going to lead to an increase in the cost of nucs and the cost of Queens going into 2023, and it's going to reach a point where I just think it's going to become unsustainable and people aren't going to want to put that money in in order to pay for a nuc or a queen. We're sitting on our hands a little bit at Black Mountain Honey in terms of the UK-mated queens, our own and the Yolanta queens. They're staying at £50 each. We put the price of an imported queen up by £1 each per queen, so pretty small increase really, about 3 or 4% increase on the imported queens. But the nucs will definitely be going up this year. Just in a single year, the price increase on the Payne's poly nuc has been around kind of £15 or £20. Add that to the diesel, add that to the wood and the frames. There's a lot of money that goes into making those nucs. So we're either going to have to go with a completely different strategy and maybe send them out in Correx, which I really don't want to do, or we're going to have to increase the prices slightly. So there you go. That's my summary of the rising cost of beekeeping, how it impacts our business, and my predictions for 2023. Are you feeling the pinch of beekeeping as well? If you are, stick it in the comments. Let me know your thoughts. If you want to see a specific video about tracking the cost of polyhives throughout the years, check out this video here where I show you the cost increases on a Maysmore polyhive over the last 5 years.