Mrs Bs Bees

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Gilberdyke John

Queen Bee
Joined
May 5, 2013
Messages
5,441
Reaction score
1,732
Location
HU15 East Yorkshire
Hive Type
14x12
Number of Hives
10
Phone call from the mrs. There's a program on about a farmers market in Winchester and one of the stalls is a beekeeper selling honey and candles. They have a sign up says Mrs Bs Bees dont rush home though as it'll soon be finished.🤔
Anyone know Mrs B?
 
There's often a stall with a beekeeper from Wiltshire selling lots of products there including "Raw organic honey" if there is such a thing

Winchester prices as well
 
Mrs B's Bees are based in Alton. They supply a deli local to me and although it's a posh place from memory the retail prices are not over the top.
 
Phone call from the mrs. There's a program on about a farmers market in Winchester and one of the stalls is a beekeeper selling honey and candles. They have a sign up says Mrs Bs Bees dont rush home though as it'll soon be finished.🤔
Anyone know Mrs B?
Yes, met her a few years ago at a market at Secrett's in Milford (west of Guildford) and had a good chat; at that time Debbie Burton was a Southern SBI but retired after 6 years in 2017.

Honey is sold in 1lb jars (regretfully) at £7/lb retail and she has several apiaries. More at Mrs B's website.
 
£7 a pound? That's cheap!
No wonder I get inundated at my front door for £5 per lb(454gr) jars? Must try harder to rip my customers off eh?
 
No wonder I get inundated at my front door for £5 per lb(454gr) jars? Must try harder to rip my customers off eh?
I sell my raw local honey in accordance to the prices that the market says it should sell at. One has to protect these prices, so they are not devalued and lead to the product being put into the class of all the inferior imports.
There has been a lot of debate on this site about honey prices in the past. I suggest you read them? Generally, local honey sells for around £9 per pound. Many think that it should actually be over £10.
The retail price at the shop that sells some of my honey is £8.75 per pound and £4.95 for an eight ounce jar. I offer discounts to regular customers and gave away dozens of jars of honey this year to friends and allotment holders, where one of my apiaries is.
I don't 'rip people off.'
You would be wise to understand the true value of the unique resource that you sell. I am sure that there are some people on here who would gladly buy all the honey you have at £5 a pound, so they could re-sell it!
 
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We were selling ours locally in my wife’s pharmacy at £8.50 for 340g. Only had about 40 jars leading to many disappointed return customers. Could have comfortably sold 10x that. This year hopefully. People really appreciate the taste and the story behind it i.e. that it’s from hives near where they live and is processed by us at home.
 
£5.00 a lb is just ripping yourself off - that's almost bulk price
It’s all anybody is willing to pay here. Our local association sells their honey for this as “we are a non profit organisation” and everybody follows suit.
At the last event they had I tackled the apiary manager about it and said what a disservice he was doing to the rest of us producing a quality product. He wasn’t interested. Even their labels are rubbish! No effort put into it at all. I despair.
 
If beekeepers choose to live in ignorance, regarding the special resources that their bees produce then we are lost!
 
It’s all anybody is willing to pay here. Our local association sells their honey for this as “we are a non profit organisation” and everybody follows suit.
At the last event they had I tackled the apiary manager about it and said what a disservice he was doing to the rest of us producing a quality product. He wasn’t interested. Even their labels are rubbish! No effort put into it at all. I despair.
I do my best for the rural community in which live and I still make a profit selling my 'pure' honey, jarred & filtered and labelled to meet any and all the Food Standards requirements for which I have a certificate to prove I am doing it correctly. Sorry if that is a crime?
 
Must try harder to rip my customers off eh?
At the last event they had I tackled the apiary manager about it and said what a disservice he was doing to the rest of us producing a quality product. He wasn’t interested.
The moment a label goes on a jar and a beekeeper gets up and joins us on the selling stage, that beekeeper ought to have learned their lines first.

Our collective role (whether a beekeeper likes it or not) is that by the time the audience leave the theatre they understand the value of local honey, which in the context of Brexit, environmental food miles, weak food-supply lines exposed by C19 and the dilution of cheap supermarket honey, ought to tell us that we have a Unique Selling Proposition that will allow us to sell at a price that isn't stuck in 1965.

Doing the best for the rural community is an unusual angle to take because it presumes you know the spending power of people in your selling range. Perhaps some appear to have less disposable cash, but perhaps they value Netflix or a weekly scratchcard more than they do honey, which for many years you've trained them to expect to be cheap and so of lesser value.

You say Sorry if that is a crime? when you and all of us know plainly that it is not, so the dramatic use of the phrase suggests you seek only to defend your market position: sell cheap, perpetuate the idea that your product is of lesser value, and stay in the past.

The USP link above begins: Before you can begin to sell your product or service to anyone else, you have to sell yourself on it.

In other words, it's time to chuck away the old script and learn the one the rest of us are reading.
 
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Most of my honey gets sold to a shop and I get more than £5/lb for it.

Due to recommendations here I changed by jar size and don't regret it for a second (well apart from now being stuck with a box of 1lb jars doing nothing in my store!).
 
It's not a 'Crime' to undervalue your honey, but suggest that you are a bit free with the phrase 'Rip Off.' Are you suggesting that some of us are cheating our customers?
No. Just some of the farmers markets are.
 
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