Putting the bees on payroll
I was in the supermarket staring at a 500g jar of honey (yum), about AUD$9.50, when my brain wandered off to Jason Statham as The Beekeeper of all things, and somehow ended up somewhere darker.
What is honey, really, if not the product of humans putting a smaller species to work and quietly pocketing what they make? Interspecies slavery, basically.
So I wanted to know: what's the fair price of honey? If the bees were on the books, on a proper Australian wage, what would a jar actually cost?
The internet already had a stab at this estimating something absurd like US$182,000 a jar. It traces to a r/theydidthemath thread, and it's a fun starting point. BUT it pays every bee in the hive as if she forages her whole life, runs an American wage, and works in pounds.
So I figured I'd do it properly, starting from one bee, in metric(!) and on Australian wages.
We need to know 2 things:
- the wages of the bees who fill the jar, and (variable cost)
- the hive they have to build and upkeep before they can fill a single jar with honey. (fixed cost)
Fair price of a jar (the build up)
Bees per jar: about 845
A single worker bee makes barely any honey, about 1/12th of a teaspoon over its entire life. That's under 0.6 grams total!
Part of why it's so little is that most of what a bee gathers never makes it into the jar. Honey gets manufactured, not collected.
The key steps:
- A forager sucks watery nectar up through a tongue like a straw into a separate honey stomach that holds about 40 milligrams (roughly half its body weight!).
- On the flight home its body works an enzyme called invertase into it, splitting the sugar into simpler ones.
- Back at the hive it brings it up mouth to mouth to a house bee, who passes it on again, each handoff adding more enzyme.
- The nectar then sits in an open cell while other bees fan their wings over it for hours, drying it from around 70 to 80% water down to roughly 18%.
Only then is it honey, and only then do they cap the cell with wax. The rest, most of what she carried home, is water fanned back out into the air.
So a 500g jar is the complete lifetime output of about 845 bees! This figure lines up with the 768 bees per pound that honey.com still quotes. To fill the jar they fly around 97,000 kilometres and visit 2.2 million flowers, nearly 7.6x the diameter of the Earth!
The foraging wage: about AUD$1.6 million a jar
A worker bee has 2 careers, and only 1 of them makes the invoice.
For her first few weeks she's a house bee, working entirely indoors: cleaning out cells, feeding the larvae up to 100 times a day, fanning her wings to hold the hive at the right temperature, secreting wax, taking a turn on guard duty. None of that shows up on the foraging bill. We'll come back to it.
The clock only starts the day she graduates to foraging. This is the job most people picture when they think of a bee, and it's far more of a slog than it looks.
A typical foraging trip:
- She flies out, usually within a few kilometres of the hive though bees have been tracked over 13 kilometres away.
- She lands on a flower and sucks the nectar up into that honey stomach.
- She also rakes loose pollen off her body and packs it into little baskets on her back legs.
- One load is dozens of flowers, and she runs that circuit 10 to 15 times a day, hauling back up to 40 milligrams of nectar a trip, near enough half her body weight!
She's on a full time wage for all of it: a standard 38 hour week at Australia's minimum of AUD$24.95 an hour.
Her foraging career is brutally short, though. The tracking studies clock it at 4 or 5 days. The field guides give her a week or two. I'll be generous and call it a fortnight. 2 full time weeks at the minimum wage comes to about AUD$1,900 a bee.
The foraging wage formula (per jar)
Step 1 — bee-hours
Step 2 — wages and amortisation
13.3% of the AUD$12M total fair price per jar
So a single jar of honey costs about AUD$1.6 million in foraging wages alone.
That's more than 30 years of full time work at the minimum wage, for ONE jar! And we were being kind: we only paid her for the fortnight she was actually out foraging. Even the brutal 4 or 5 day end, costed as a single full time week, still clears AUD$800,000.
I do this for the love of writing — each subscriber costs me money. But please subscribe anyway and spread the word.
The hive (fixed OPEX): another ~AUD$10 million per jar in unpaid labour
The foragers are costed. The factory, and everyone running it, are still on the tab.
The 845 bees flying out for one jar are roughly half the workforce. While they're out flying, 13,750-odd house bees are inside the hive working continuous shifts, and another 1,500 drones are loafing about doing absolutely nothing. None of them get a payslip either.
A commercial Australian hive ships about 100 kilos of harvestable honey a year, or roughly 200 jars at 500g each. So every fixed cost the hive racks up gets spread across about 200 jars.
Building the factory: ~AUD$5,000 a jar (amortised)
A wild colony doesn't order a flat pack off the shelf. The bees grow the building material out of their own bodies. Young workers, about 12 to 18 days old, make wax in 3 steps:
- Sweat wax out of glands under their belly, where it sets into tiny flakes like fish scales.
- Pass each flake up to the mouth and chew it soft.
- Press it into the comb.
Each scale takes around 4 minutes of fiddly mouth work to chew and press into the hexagons, and a kilo of comb is around 1.1 million scales. That's roughly 73,000 bee-hours per kilo of comb. A wild nest runs to 1 or 2 kilos, so the build alone is about 110,000 bee-hours, call it AUD$2.7 million in wages. Spread across the comb's working life of several seasons and it amortises to roughly AUD$5,000 a jar.
Plus the fuel: a bee has to eat roughly 8 kilos of honey to make 1 kilo of wax! That's another 10 kilos of the colony's own honey eaten before the first sellable jar gets filled, or about 20 jars worth, paid in kind and never billed.
The wax / comb formula (per jar)
Step 1 — bee-hours
Step 2 — wages and amortisation
Less than 0.1% of the AUD$12M total fair price per jar
Heating the factory: ~AUD$2 million a jar
Then the heating bill. The brood nest sits at 33 to 36°C year round, and bees don't hibernate. They cluster together and shiver their flight muscles to make heat, and a bee doing that burns honey at 10 to 20x the rate of one sitting still!
In winter, about 15% of a 12,500 bee cluster is on heater duty around the clock. In summer, heater bees wedge themselves into empty brood cells for up to 45 minutes a shift to keep the pupae warm. Add it up and a colony spends roughly 17 million bee-hours a year just on the thermostat. At AUD$24.95/hr that's about AUD$424 million of heating labour annually, or AUD$2 million per jar.
The heating formula (per jar)
Step 1 — bee-hours
Step 2 — wages and amortisation
17.7% of the AUD$12M total fair price per jar
The house staff: ~AUD$8 million a jar
Then everyone else. The other ~13,750 indoor workers run continuous shifts on the rest of the colony's life support:
- Cleaning out used cells
- Feeding the larvae, with every larva getting a feeding visit roughly every 43 seconds
- Fanning the open cells to dry the nectar from 70% water down to 17%
- Guarding the entrance against robbers and wasps
- Tending the queen, who has 6 to 10 personal attendants feeding her around the clock
Deduct the 5 to 8 hours a bee sleeps and the indoor workforce still puts in about 80 million bee-hours a year. Net of the 17 million already counted as heating, that's about 63 million bee-hours of pure house labour. At AUD$24.95/hr, AUD$1.57 billion a year, or roughly AUD$8 million per jar.
The house staff formula (per jar)
Step 1 — bee-hours
Step 2 — wages and amortisation
65.8% of the AUD$12M total fair price per jar
The drones: ~AUD$200,000 a jar of loafing in the corner
The other line item, and my personal favourite, is the 1,500 drones, the male bees, who live in the hive doing absolutely nothing. They sit in the warm upper part of the hive, eat honey, and wait for one mating flight they probably won't get. In autumn the colony evicts them as a drain on stores. Even at idle wages, that's another roughly AUD$200,000 a jar of male loafing time, plus a fair bit of honey.
The drone formula (per jar)
Step 1 — bee-hours
Step 2 — wages and amortisation
1.5% of the AUD$12M total fair price per jar
Hive subtotal: ~AUD$10 million a jar
The hive's fixed OPEX (per jar)
In a commercial yard the keeper hands the bees drawn comb and rotates frames every 3 to 5 years for hygiene, so the wax line item shrinks from AUD$5,000 a jar down to about AUD$1,000. A rounding error against the AUD$11.8M the rest of the hive racks up. The house staff still works every day whether the comb is fresh or 5 years old, so the commercial fair price barely flinches from AUD$12M per jar.
Plus, in both cases, about 20 jars' worth of honey eaten in kind by the colony just to fuel all of the above. Never billed.
~AUD$12 million a jar, AUD$9.50 on the shelf
Stack it up. The foragers cost roughly AUD$1.6 million in wages. The hive that makes the foraging possible costs another ~AUD$10 million in unpaid wages. The all in fair price of a single 500g jar of honey is something like AUD$12 million.
The sticker says AUD$9.50.
That gap is the entire unpaid life of an entire bee town, year after year.
One jar, fully costed (AUD, waterfall to the total)
Honey is cheap because the whole workforce is unpaid and works until it drops dead a few weeks later, the foragers soonest of all from the hazards of leaving the hive. Spread that across an entire colony of 30,000 indoor and outdoor workers, year after year, and a jar lands at AUD$9.50.
Pollination pays about 12x more than the honey
The same bees pollinate the crops, and that work is worth far more. Pollination is almost an accident from the bee's side of it.
She's only after the nectar. Pollination happens to her anyway:
- Her whole body is covered in branched, feathery hairs that snag pollen as she shoves into each flower.
- She builds up a static charge as she flies, enough that pollen jumps across the gap onto her before she even lands.
- When she pushes into the next flower of the same kind, some of that loose pollen rubs off onto its stigma, the part that fertilises the plant and lets it set fruit or seed.
She isn't trying to help. The crop just gets pollinated on her way through.
Do that across a whole growing season and the crops that lean on bee pollination are worth around AUD$4.6 billion a year to Australian agriculture, against roughly AUD$363 million for the honey itself. Call it 12 to 13x. Honey is basically the side hustle.
AUD$5 billion in value, AUD$0 in pay
Scale that up to the whole country.
Australia has roughly 886,000 registered hives quietly producing AUD$5 billion of value a year, almost all of it pollination (AUD$363M honey + AUD$4.6B pollination).
Now do the wage bill the other way. If every one of those bees was on the books at the AUD$24.95 minimum wage, the labour bill would be about AUD$2.4 billion per colony, multiplied by 886,000 colonies, which gets you roughly AUD$2 quadrillion a year. That's 400,000x the value the bees actually create in human terms.
The whole honey and pollination economy only works because the workforce gets paid nothing.
Compare an Australian barista on the Level 2 Hospitality Award at roughly AUD$25/hr pulling 80 coffees an hour at AUD$5.50 a flat white. She's generating roughly AUD$440 of revenue at the till and taking home about 6% of it. That's the floor of what we treat as fair pay in this country.
Bees take home 0%.
So what
If all this is making you feel bad about the bee slavery, relax a little. They pay themselves first, eat most of what they make, and get high on their own supply. The surplus we walk off with is whatever they left behind, give or take what an over eager keeper takes.
Next time you spot a AUD$9.50 jar on a shelf, have a think about what else in your pantry is only cheap because nobody put the workers on the books.
Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and do not represent any other parties.
Newsletter
I do this for the love of writing.
Each subscriber costs me money, but please do it anyway and spread the word. Monthly at most.
You might also like
Mobile gaming's missing brain
Every studio tracks ARPDAU, ROAS, retention curves. None of them answer the question actually worth asking -- which specific player is about to churn.
AI shopping is years away. The infrastructure isn't.
When the AI does the buying, value migrates from attention to delegation. Stripe's five level map shows where commerce is today and what changes at Level 4.
Where does all the milk go?
I bought a 1.5L bottle of milk and wondered where it all goes. The answer branches into 50+ products -- including paint, glue, and bankable Italian cheese.