The Mythical Bee Month

April 3, 2018 3:15 PM

How many bee-hours does it take to make (say) 1 liter of honey?

There are hundreds of explanations online of how long it takes to make hoeny, but every single one I've found makes at least one major dimensional analysis error in its description; e.g. "it takes N bees to fill a jar of honey" (ok, but over how long?).

posted by dmd to Science & Nature (2 answers total)

Best answer: There's a lot to say about this, and it's very hard to make good estimates, especially across all bees in all the places in the world.

Assuming we're talking about commercial domestic honey bees, hive size can vary quite a bit, but there are some tendencies in frame size bees-per-frame, etc.

Here is some USA honey industry data on yield per colony per state per year (2016). As you can see, it varies quite a bit even at the state level, let alone the county or colony level.

If you wanted to average all those states in a given year, and use a mean number of bees per hive, you could do that from the sources above. But that would be missing a lot of the story, because bees spend their time doing lots of different things, and it's not trivial to know what they are up to. For a taste of what's involved, see e.g. this dissertation on how much time bees spend acquiring nectar in one situation.

For some recent concrete numbers, see this economic analysis of traditional and modern box hives.

This is part of why you don't see honey production calculated in bee months. The meaningful industry standard is hive production per year, and scientists still have a hell of a time understanding complex hive dynamics and how workers allocate their time.
posted by SaltySalticid at 3:56 PM on April 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

YouTube:Cody'sLab he did a "year of beekeeping" videos. I know one is on extracting honey. I don't know, but I'd bet that he gives enough info over the year for you to get an estimate of the productivity of his bees. Probably not typical since I think he's located at high altitude in Colorado.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:03 PM on April 3, 2018