Mengdie Hu, Yu Gu, Tianqi Shi, Jiayin Lin, Tiantian Xu

CIS 240
Prof. Mohr
Dec.2, 2019

Visualization Project Write-Up

A Brief Analysis of American Honey Industry

Data & Data Source

People have witnessed many US industries thriving and flourishing in the past twenty years.
Unfortunately, the domestic honey business is not one of them. The occurrence of Colony
Collapse Disorder in 2006 greatly reduced honeybee population, causing honey production to
decrease. Even today, after thirteen years, the American honey industry is still struggling under
the influence of the blow. Various concerns have been raised by the public regarding the
recession of American honey. A large number of surveys and datasets were conducted to
investigate the production and sales details of honey in the United States.

In this project, we performed five data visualizations based on the data produced by the National
Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). The dataset is called “honey production”, with attributes
including:

State: abbreviation of States in the United States

Numcol: number of colonies that produced honey

Yieldpercol: honey yield (per pound)

Totalprod: production in total (in pounds)

Stocks: stocks held by producers (in pounds)

Priceperlb: price of honey (per pound)

Prodvalue: value of honey production (Totalprod x Priceperlb)

Year: 1998 - 2012

Country: United States

The dataset has already been preprocessed and combined from three original datasets, which
were separated into three files in a confusing format. To enable better data analysis, the data
publisher has extracted and put all the useful information together. The dataset, after his
preprocessing work, has already fulfilled our requirement. We added the “Country” column for
better map display, but overall, we did not spend too much time transforming the dataset
ourselves.

What is being visualized? What question is being asked? What insights can be gained?

In this project, we tried to analyze the data from an investor’s perspective. As an investor, should
I invest money on honey business based on the data? If the industry is profitable, where should I
start my investment? To answer these questions, we analyzed the data from five different
aspects, conducted our research and performed corresponding data visualizations.

Part I: Overview of Production

The first question we had regarding the dataset is the distribution of production among different
states. In addition, we would like to know the major honey production states. To have a clear
view, we created a pie chart of production distribution every four years. The chart shows that
California, Florida, and North Dakota always produced the most honey, while North Dakota has
an increasing share of the business. Based on the outcome, we conducted our own research in the
secret behind the large share of the honey business. To our surprise, the reasons for the success
for each state are quite different. For California, honeybees have easy-going temperature and a
plethora of floral sources, making it easy to produce honey. For Florida, it has a large number of
tupelo and orange blossoms. While having a favorable sweet taste, they are able to survive from
crystallizing for long periods of time. On the other side, despite the freezing winter in North
Dakota which could have a negative impact on honey production, the warm days and cool nights
during other seasons provide an optimal condition for nectar secretion of plants, which
eventually lead to the satisfying amount of honey production.

Part II: Prices

In the United States, 350 out of the 400 million pounds of honey are imported every year. The
domestic production is far from satisfying all the demand for honey. Before we enter the
business, it is important to look into trend for the prices among different states. In other words,
which state is willing to pay the money for “our honey”? In this case, we used two maps to show
the difference between price distribution in 2012 and in 1998. The first observation we can get is
that regardless of the time, Virginia and North Carolina always offer the relatively higher bids. In
other words, the honey business in these two states are stable. Second, we can see clearly that
there are several blank states on the map. According to the explanation provided by National
Agricultural Statistics Service, the honey industries in these states have shrunk so much that only
one or two individuals are still running the business. To protect their privacy, the statistics
department hides their data from the public. The most significant contrast occurs in Nevada. In
1998, Nevada citizens were willing to pay the most money for local-produced honey.
Surprisingly, despite the highest price, the business still disappeared.
Part III: Total Production Values

Apart from the production and the sales price, we also raised a question regarding the change in
the total production values between different states. Specifically, we compared the total
production value among California, Florida, North Dakota, New York, and South Dakota. From
the visualization, we could see that North Dakota experienced the sharpest increase in its total
production value, California had the most fluctuations, New York basically remained unchanged,
while the other two had similar trends with subtle but unstable increase. Based on the output, we
can conclude that the honey business in North Dakota would be the right place to go. However,
due to the highly fluctuating production value, we need to conduct further investigations before
we draw a final conclusion.

Besides, we can see that there are two major drops of product value of North Dakoda. The first
one is in 2003 and the other one is in 2010. After research, we found that in 2010, the number of
managed honeybee colonies dropped by an estimated 35.8%, while in 2008 and 2009, the
number dropped by 31.8% respectively. The colony collapse disorder killed those bees and
rapidly lowered the production of honey, which eventually led to a recession in the honey
business.

Part IV: What happened in 2000?

From the year 2000 to 2002, the price of honey per pound experienced a rapid increase while
stocks held by producers decreased considerably. Based on the result, we speculated that there
must be some events happened in this period that either diminished total honey production or
stimulate total honey sales. Through online investigation, we found out that from the year 2000,
the American National Honey Board used the fund raised by Foreign Agricultural Service to
conduct market research, technical support and trading service at foreign countries. One typical
example is Yemen. Research has shown that 65% of the consumers in Yemen were fond of raw
honey. Based on this result, the National Honey Board helped American honey producers to
promote the sales of domestically made honey to foreign customers. Additionally, in 2001, U.S.
Customs Service imposed anti-dumping duties on imports from Argentina and China in order to
protect local producers. Therefore, both of the two practices mentioned above could potentially
increase the demand of domestically produced honey which led to intense increase in market
price and decrease in stock during that period.

Part V: The Lucrative

Within all states in the United States, the average price of honey per pound was the highest in
North Carolina in 1998. It was over twice as expensive as the least price of honey in Mississippi
State. For the following years, North Carolina’s honey price remained high among other states.
The question is: why is honey in North Carolina so expensive and what are the potential
opportunities? Looking up historical events happened around that period, North Carolina was
mainly suffering from mites and parasites that bees were not able to resist naturally starting
1990s. It made the yields of honey drop which caused the price of honey increase dramatically.
Moreover, the suspension of government price protection program increased the tension on the
price of honey. Furthermore, Hawaii’s honey price has become extremely high in recent years.
The potential reasons are as follows. One is that the flourishing tourism greatly increases
customers’ demand for honey and bring relatively huge added value to the local honey price.
Second, Hawaii is one of the only places that is able to have mated queen bees available to
export year-round. Those queen bees from Hawaii are often requested by Mainland and Canada
to help build colonies fast enough in order to be ready for pollination season. Thus, the
peculiarity of Hawaii’s bees further adds to the demand of both bees and honey, causing the
price to rise rapidly. For these two states, the demand for honey keeps rising while supply
couldn’t reach a corresponding level. Therefore, funding local beekeepers in these two states to
increase their honey yield and production would be a good investing opportunity to gain
lucrative profits in the honey production business.

Next-Step Ideas

The first next-step idea we have is investigating the current honey business in Nevada. The data
for this state is left blank by NASS for privacy concern. However, based on other data analysis,
we can see that Nevada can be potentially a very profitable state for honey sales. Therefore, if we
have the chance to collect first-hand information ourselves, we may have new discoveries, which
can possibly influence our decision as an investor.

Second, we observed an abnormal datapoint when performing data visualizations. In 2002, all
the states suffered a decrease in the honey yield per colony. However, there was one exception –
New York State. In New York, an unusual increase in the honey yield per colony was observed.
Appropriate research into this rare phenomenon may be helpful to our investment in the honey
business.

Third, we are also curious about the demand of honey. The dataset we worked on this time
mainly addresses the case from the supplier side. If we have additional time, we will look for
data on the demand side and conduct our research to get a more accurate result. Similarly, data
about the amount of honey imported will be very helpful as well.

References:

1. Dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/jessicali9530/honey-production
2. https://www.marketplace.org/2016/10/21/why-honeybees-are-sweet-north-dakota/
3. https://www.thebeebx.com/single-post/2018/10/18/Top-Honey-Producing-States-in-the-
US
4. “Colony Collapse Disorder.” EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, 26 Apr. 2018,
https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder.
5. Salemson, Daniel J. “Insect.” NCpedia, https://www.ncpedia.org/symbols/insect.
6. http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/February-2017/Local-Honey-is-
Having-a-Moment-What-You-Should-Know-About-This-Sweet-Comeback/
7. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/30389959/priced-out-of-paradise-what-drives-
hawaiis-high-cost-of-living/
8. https://www.hawaiimagazine.com/content/hawaiis-buzzing-queen-bee-industry