M4tt

That answer is easy. The co op will always hold back a portion of returns , every year , so they can effectively afford to buy honey when it cannot be sold. The answer is easy but in reality it does not work . No one wants a lower price on a high year just so there is money to buy in a bad year . That is why co ops do not thrive in the good times and suppliers walk

A year ago I opened the hives to the horror of seeing mites on bees , so I permanently binned synthetic strips. I then embarked upon successfully halting the decline and recovering them with @Philbee OA staples, mid Winter . Today I started on my June round of beekeeping , which involves checking where the brood is and moving the staples back into the middle of it and the cluster . So it's been 12 months since I started with staples and I will not use anything else. The bees are healthy , all of them . Far better than ever for winter . I believe it's vital to move the staples back into the cluster , monthly , Autumn and winter 😊😊

Yes, loads of clover all year round. Dairy farmers have never stopped using clover . The urea used is additional Nitrogen on top of what the clover fixes. Rhizobium bacteria do not fix nitrogen from that atmosphere all year round . They are seasonal producers , so the artificial N plugs the gaps. Clover has been susceptible to several pests over the years that have a good go at wiping it out. Clover flea, clover root weevil to name a couple.

One of ours sheds here is an old honey house . I'm guessing it's about 90 years old . It used to be full of Clydesdale gear for haymaking , which went to museums 30 years ago . I can't go back in time and ask , but from what I understand, individual farmers kept their own bees . Unfortunately there are no pictures and I don't know what they did with their honey , but it would have been sold as additional income. Ours was one of the first dairy farms here and the first to use fertiliser way back when ....

To whom are you asking what ?

Yep, I observed exactly this a while back . Bees empty the bottom box and move up . The Staples must be moved with the cluster otherwise they are ineffective and mites build up in numbers

Yes they will be collecting the nectar , no doubt .

Does that two years take into account another two years of stockpiled honey, or is the increase up to $7 reflect a dramatic drop of in production for two years, followed by a shortage , and therefore price increase . It's something to think about because some will keep producing and others will drop off, and the combined effect of these two actions plus supply and demand both here and abroad is far too difficult to build a reliable picture on . A price increase can really only be driven by a shortage of product , top shelf stuff aside.

No I don’t think so. The decision makers got it wrong trying to eliminate it . mBovis is a cunning little disease that can easily hide and there are hundreds of thousands of cattle movements all over NZ for any number of justifiable reasons . Going by what the rest of the world does , it’s simply a case of culling animals with clinical symptoms . Most never go clinical . There are a host of other diseases we manage this way .

There is no evidence honey is being moved at that rate ? The maths is wrong

Yes and no . The cost could well wipe out our economy . Most of the cattle being killed do not have the disease . They are being killed by association , as it’s still very hard to get a reliable positive or negative result from the test . There is no doubt in my mind that this disease cannot be irradicated , and if it can , the cost is too high . I should keep my opinion to myself , but a blind person could see the program isn’t working and the situation is going from bad to very much worse

It would seem this thing is proving more difficult than the experts expected to eradicate https://i.stuff.co.nz/southland-times/news/112773108/mpi-issues-more-than-60-m-bovis-notices-of-direction-ahead-of-gypsy-day

I don't get it either. I blindly produced milk for years under the assumption that people need food and would always pay for premium safe produce . Once the cost of production gets close to or exceeds the foods monetary value, you are wasting your time producing it . Don't forget , the co op happily takes their share, or increasingly more of, to balance their books at the expense of the producer . There is legislation protecting co op capital, which is also very unhelpful to those trying to exit the business . My LIC shares are illiquid because there is no growth in dairy and they can only be sold to and expanding dairy Farmer . NZ is very vulnerable to world politics and hiccups , none of which are ever helpful positively to producers . We are still price takers , and more often than not now , the price is not satisfactory . I suspect we are more important in our own minds, on the world stage, than we actually are , hence the lack of demand for our products

Ok fair call . Why involve the government ? My understanding is they fund innovation/new ideas that increase productivity In other words , they ‘might’ look at funding someone’s clever idea that involved sustainability , or a new innovation involving honey . And that’s a big ‘might ‘.

Im saying the same as you.