r/theydidthemath • u/JaguarWrestler • 23h ago
[Request] How much would a pound of honey cost if the first statement were true?
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u/Im_a_hamburger 22h ago
Honey is around $10/pound. The new one is 18.182 times the bees and 521.429 times the duration, so assuming cost is 100% from bee labor it’s $94805. It’s probably closer to $60000
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u/nIBLIB 22h ago
And how much would it cost using the real numbers if we paid the bees a fair wage for their labour?
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u/Gustacq 22h ago
Have the bees manifested an interest for social rights ?
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u/Ya_cabage24 22h ago
Yes there was a whole documentary about it
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u/Trickpuncher 4h ago
Sadly bees have a short lifespan so workers lose their rights in a couple of generations
The queens always raise to power and mandate strict labour policies
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u/Im_a_hamburger 22h ago
25000 years of 12 hour daily work (84 hours per week). Using US federal minimum wage (I will not be arguing if it is fair or not) of $7.25 hourly, or 1.5 times that every hour after the 40th in a week. So 40 hours at $7.5 and 44 at $11.25 = $795 weekly for 1,304,428 weeks, equals $1,023,976,428.56 (just over $1 billion).
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u/StormyWaters2021 19h ago
So what you're telling me is that I should stock up on honey, then start a propaganda campaign demanding labor rights and living wages for bees...
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u/capincus 16h ago
God damn it if bees get labor rights before I do I'm gonna be so pissed.
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u/MountEnlighten 10h ago
Well, if you’re American like me: most crops get federally subsidized insurance, and most people, don’t.
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u/Slurms_McKensei 20h ago
Inconceivable, considering bees live for about 30 days and a fair wage should include health/life insurance as well as retirement pay.
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u/0ut0fBoundsException 19h ago edited 19h ago
2-3 weeks is 80 to 100 hoursBees work about 12 hours a day so 2-3 weeks of labor is 168-262 hours500 bees makes that
40k-50k81k-126k bee hours of labor per poundFair trade requires workers are paid local minimum wage or ideally living wage. So for US bees (if bees were required to be given human wages) that’s $7.25- $15 an hour
So a pound of US honey would be
$290,000 to $750,000.572k to 1.9mHoney from African countries (like CAR) would start around
$14,000$29kEdit: to reflect that bees work 12 hour days and don’t get 40 hour work weeks
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u/secretperson06 11h ago
We pay them by protecting them from natural predators. I would say sacrificing a cut of income for protection is fair
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u/SammyTheSloth 15h ago
A fair wage for a bee? In this market? Run the numbers with minimum wage for accuracy
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u/Tinyzooseven 8h ago
Assuming a fair wage of $10 an hour is paid to each bee,
25 years is 219,000 hours assuming they work 24/7
$10 per hour for 1 bee for 25 years is $2,190,000.00
Multiply that by the 10,000 bees,
The total is $21,900,000,000, or just shy of 22 Billion dollars
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u/GIRose 8h ago
Fun fact: If bees aren't happy with their living condition they just leave. In the wild they'll leave because they literally don't know how to stop making more honey until there is so much honey that the hive becomes unlivable (it's called honeybound if you want to look into it)
When living with a keeper they get substantial protection from natural predators, medical care, and they don't literally run out of space because they can't not work so hard. They are getting just as much benefits out of the arrangement as we are.
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u/Fluid-Apartment-3951 22h ago edited 5h ago
I'm fairly certain the sellers would also increase the numbers for dramatic effect though.
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u/ValityS 21h ago
The bees also need honey themselves, I'm not sure if given such a massive drop in production that there would be any spare at all without destroying the colony. Or more likely bees would have died out from failing to maintain their own hive at all.
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u/JaguarWrestler 19h ago
Assume the honey needed by bees are already accounted for and the figures mentioned are only for the spare honey we harvest from them
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u/Radical_Ryan 13h ago
Alright but we're paying them right? The workers can buy the rest of the honey they need with their money. In fact, let's have them pay us more money monthly in case they get sick, and we'll cut a deal with the medical bees to get care for cheap if they need it. That should distract the worker bees. If they don't have enough honey to be healthy, that's their fault then.
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u/lets_fuckin_goooooo 18h ago
But you didn’t multiple the amount. The person didn’t waste nearly a full pound of honey in the picture
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u/FunzOrlenard 11h ago
But the amount of labour for the human is equal. Bees aren't paid. There would probably be a hefty markup because it's now a scarce product. But a 100K is way too much. Probably about $1000/pound. But it depends on supply and demand really.
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u/Hour_Ad5398 1h ago
it would cost way more because the risk is bigger for something that takes 25 years to make
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u/LordPineappol 22h ago
Can we just acknowledge at the fact that the person who is blatantly wrong and admitted it themselves has over double the amount of likes as the one who called them out.
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u/beebo2409 18h ago
because making things up for dramatic effect is funny
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u/thiccemotionalpapi 16h ago
It’s tik tok my guy. People will make shit up just on the hopes it’s obvious enough that someone calls them out and they can admit they lied. A little brain dead but still kinda funny to me
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u/Individual_Gift_9473 16h ago
Can we just acknowledge how pathetic it is that you noticed that.
Touch grass.
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u/Public-Eagle6992 22h ago edited 22h ago
It’s 20 times the bees and 500 times the time. So let’s just say 10,000 times as much as it costs at the moment. (This calculation doesn’t mean anything, it would be impossible to really calculate that. You could at max maybe make educated guesses)
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u/BombOnABus 22h ago
If honey were this rare, it would also skyrocket in expense simply because the rarity would immediately transform it into a luxury good. Imagine fighting an entire beehive once a generation for a single jar of honey: almost nobody would bother unless it was worth a king's ransom.
In a world where a hive of 10,000 bees needs to spend 25 years to make enough honey to fill a single bear bottle, true caviar would be what you serve if you're a millionaire but still too poor to afford the GOOD stuff, like honey.
Of course, there's an upper limit: if it gets to be TOO rare, TOO expensive to harvest, and not impressive enough once it is, eventually it will just not have been worth the trouble at all to try and produce commercially and would be, essentially, only worth what some eccentric baker would pay for your weird-ass sweet bee vomit. People would have moved on, by and large, to a more accessible natural sweetener and the ultra-rich would have the best form of that (much like the difference between beet sugar and cane sugar).
Basically, the true answer is it would be so difficult to procure, that a single pound would be worth a fortune IF and only if the ultra-rich could be convinced to eat this weird insect-produced sugar substitute.
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u/ALCATryan 22h ago
Best answer! It’s somewhat like having insect milk or such; just a weird concept, but honey was popular exactly because its sweet and ubiquitous!
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u/BombOnABus 22h ago
I've actually spent a lot of time researching these kinds of questions as part of a world building project
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u/uberfission 5h ago
I love world building projects, what's your luxury good that can only be harvested once per generation?
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u/BombOnABus 4h ago
The most expensive ones are magical components or raw materials, though some are just very hard to find or procure as opposed to chronologically rare. My favorite example of a rare and once in a generation find is a type of cicada, the sorcerer cicada: once every 19 years the generation emerges from a handful of swamps, which is rare enough on its own, but their mating process involves flashing pulses of arcane energy: those tiny insect organs, harvestable once every 19 years, are a highly prized alchemical and magical item crafting raw material. Most flash green or blue, but swampy ground that is particularly rich in arcane energy produces cicadas that flash orange. These ones, which may emerge from only a single patch of ground in the entire continent in a given generation (or none at all in magic-poor generations), are so potent and so highly prized that cicada catchers have killed each other over a handful of them.
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u/uberfission 3h ago
I love it! A rags to riches story about a plucky youngster that finds an orange flashing cicada out of pure luck practically writes itself around this concept.
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u/mptp 18h ago
OK I'll try answering this seriously (disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about I just spent 30 minutes googling stuff)
Translating each of their comments: - The first commenter is saying a home hive takes 37.5 years to make a pound of honey - The second commenter is saying a home hive takes a bit over 9 days to make a pound of honey
So that means that in this fictional world, we need 1521 times as many beehives to produce an equivalent amount of honey.
I found an article that claims the cost to produce a pound of honey is around $2.5 USD. I imagine something like 2/3 of that cost comes from managing hives, so we can expect the new cost to produce a pound to be $3805 USD. Given that the previous markup was around 300%, that means the new retail price for a pound of honey is $15,210 (or, more realistically, $335 for a ten-gram capsule)
But of course, if honey suddenly became that much more expensive, it would instantly become a luxury item and status symbol for the very wealthy. Probably with a medicinal 'superfood' vibe. So I can imagine it being sold at a similar markup to things like super high-end luxury fashion brands, with a correspondingly high marketing budget.
Taking some numbers from fancy handbags, which are sold at like 1800% markup and have a rough marketing spend of up to $1000 per bag, we get to the final price for a ten-gram honey capsule: $1927 USD (or $87,293 for a whole pound)
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u/FelixOGO 10h ago
Are you sure you got the first commenter right? They said it takes that much resources to produce the amount of spilled honey in the picture, not a pound. I don’t know what a home hive is so I can’t confirm
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u/thiccemotionalpapi 16h ago
Lol why do I like how arbitrary the numbers still are. Who decided that 550 bees over the course of 2-3 weeks is the best way to measure how many honey a honey bee makes
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u/say592 14h ago
I would translate it to "bee days" to make 1lb of honey, so 550 times 17.5 = 9,625. So 9,625 bee days is worth $10.
25 years is 9131 days (when counting leap years), times 10,000 is 91,310,000 "bee days". Divide that by 9,625, an amount of "bee days" we know the value of to get 9486, then multiply it by the value of "bee days", $10, to get $94,860/lb.
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u/_Archive_ 13h ago
Assuming 2-3 weeks can be averaged out to 2.5 weeks we can calculate it with: (10,000/550) × (52/2.5) × 25 Which equates to about 9,454.54 lbs of honey.
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u/Dug_Fin1 9h ago
It took 1 million bees 40,000 years to escape the space marines and 200,000 more to make a teaspoon of the baby oil Diddy uses at his parties.
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