An analysis on the economic aspects of beekeeping activities: The Konya example

Beekeeping is an agricultural activity in which honey bee colonies produce products such as honey, beeswax, royal jelly, pollen, propolis and bee venom using natural environmental and agricultural resources and transform these products into economic gain. This process stands out as an important economic activity for rural development and sustainable agriculture due to its low operating costs, low capital requirement and high added value of products with long shelf life. Beekeeping not only provides direct income through trade of products but also increases the productivity of the agricultural sector by providing indirect economic contributions through pollination in plant production. In this study, the economic sustainability and productivity elements of the beekeeping sector in Konya province were analyzed from an economic perspective. The main purpose of the research is to determine the technical, economic and socio-demographic characteristics of beekeeping enterprises and to reveal the effects of these characteristics on profitability, sustainability and production efficiency. Data were collected using face-to-face survey method with 90 beekeeping enterprises operating in 18 different districts of Konya. The obtained data set was statistically examined with regression models as well as ANOVA and ChiSquare tests. The analysis results show that the existence of a different economic activity other than beekeeping affects the preference of beekeeping for professional (migratory) or hobby (stable) purposes at a statistically significant level. On the other hand, the effect of the education level of the beekeeping business owner on both honey yield and the rate of benefiting from government support was not found to be statistically significant. It was observed that product diversity had a positive and significant effect on annual income, and beekeepers selling multiple products earned higher annual income compared to those selling single products. No significant effect was detected on the determination of the applied unit price of honey sales method (cash, forward or forward-forward). Similarly, the effect of the annual honey sales price on annual income was not found to be statistically significant, and it was revealed that the income level depends on different factors other than price. The data show that beekeeping in Konya is mostly carried out by medium-sized enterprises, and that in a significant part of the sector, honey yield per hive is between 12-17 kg, showing a limited production performance. As a result, this research reveals that the contributions of beekeeping to rural development are only possible with productivity-enhancing and supportive policies; it also shows that enterprises need concrete improvements in terms of scale-up, product diversification, training and financing.