It’s been 60 years since desperation brought beekeepers together to form a co-operative.
Today, farmers involved with the Manitoba Co-operative Honey Producers Ltd. say it’s as important as it ever was to helping them get fair returns for their honey in a business that is not always sweet.
“To me, the co-op provides peace of mind,” said Stephen Olnick, a second-generation honey producer from Stonewall, Man.
Membership in the co-op is voluntary. Olnick belongs because he doesn’t want the headaches of marketing his honey – sending out samples, negotiating price, finding clean 45-gallon drums to ship his honey, and hiring a trucker.
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Some honey producers have been put out of business by unscrupulous brokers or packers who pay late, or don’t pay at all, said Olnick, a member of the co-op for 25 years.
Norm Bartel, chair of the co-op, remembers his father talking about what it was like in the 1930s, when small beekeepers sold their honey to brokers in the fall.
“They would simply play one (farmer) against the other and offer them almost nothing for the honey,” said Bartel, who farms at Kleefeld, Man.
The co-op gave farmers more clout, he said. Marketing power increased when the Manitoba co-op starting selling with a similar co-op in Alberta, under a brand now known as Bee Maid Honey.
“The Bee Maid label is well-recognized and also very well respected,” said Bartel.
“It’s sort of the measuring stick by which other products are measured.”
The co-op has increased its business 10-fold over the past six decades, currently selling $15 to $25 million of honey per year.
The Manitoba co-op handles a little less than half the honey produced in the province, said Bartel. It takes new members only when it feels it can sell their honey.
There are 20 people on a waiting list to join.
“They are large producers who we have always thought of as being very competent marketers in their own right, and yet now are looking to be members of the co-op,” said Bartel.
The co-op pools returns from honey sold throughout the year, giving producers an average of the year’s sales.
Farmers doing their own marketing can get higher prices, he said. But they can also get lower prices.
Over the years, co-op members have received a better than average price for their honey, he contended.
Today, the industry is “relatively healthy,” said Bartel. But 10 years ago, honey producers watched a third of their colleagues give up their hives.
“It went to a point where we were losing money every year. We were simply living on our equity,” said Bartel.
A United States subsidy program pushed up prices and spurred production in North America. U.S. packers bought Canadian honey because it was slightly cheaper and of higher quality, said Bartel.
In the mid-1980s, the U.S. government realized it owned hundreds of millions of pounds of honey in storage. The program was cancelled, prices sank.
It took more than five years for the industry to work through the stocks.
“Some (Canadian producers) went bankrupt, some sold out and went and did something else,” said Bartel.
“Others came so close that you could taste it. We were one of those.”
Then, in 1987, Canada closed its border to U.S. bees because of concerns about parasitic mites.
“That kind of put the final nail in the coffin for some people,” he said.
Many Canadian producers had relied on getting a new crop of bees each spring from southern U.S. states. When the border closed, they faced huge expenses importing bees from New Zealand, or were forced to learn to keep their bees alive over the winter.
