A BRIEF SURVEY OF HAWAIIAN BEE KEEPING. 45 



" BEE RIGHTS." 



The buying of "bee rights," as it is practiced in Hawaii, is some- 

 thing practically unheard of elsewhere, and would certainly appear 

 to a mainland bee keeper as a new and strange procedure. The near- 

 est approach to it is the renting of locations for out yards, which can 

 not usually insure no competition. This practice would not be pos- 

 sible were it not for the fact that most of the available agricultural 

 land on the islands is held in large tracts, mostly as sugar-cane planta- 

 tions and ranches. Arrangements are made with the manager of 

 a plantation for locations for apiaries, and the bee keeper agrees 

 to pay a certain amount for the use of the land and for the honey 

 removed from these apiaries. Frequently this is in the form of an 

 agreement to pay a certain sum for each ton of honey removed from 

 the plantation, but at times it is a fixed sum for the year, the bee keeper 

 assuming what small risk there is of not getting a crop. The planta- 

 tion management in turn agrees to allow no other bee keepers to keep 

 bees in its territory. There are frequently small holdings within the 

 boundaries of the plantation over which the plantation company has 

 no control, and some other bee keeper may lease these with the idea 

 of allowing his bees to range over the entire plantation. If, for 

 example, he puts 200 colonies on such a holding, the immediate 

 placing of say 500 colonies just across the line has a discouraging- 

 effect on this poaching and it can end in only one way, since the bee 

 keeper who has a right there has the advantage. The same thing 

 happens when an outside bee keeper gets too close to the boundary 

 line. 



Naturally, when land is divided into smaller holdings, as is the 

 case almost everywhere on the mainland, such an arrangement is not 

 possible and a bee keeper must run the risk of competition. There is 

 no way of telling what amount of honey is taken from any given 

 area when the tracts are small. The moral right of priority claim, 

 which so many bee keepers advocate, has small place in the manipula- 

 tions of territory in Hawaii, where the bee-keeping companies pay 

 for what the} 7 get and insist on getting it. One of the large com- 

 panies gains its exclusive right by reason of the fact that it owns and 

 leases a tract of over 100,000 acres for ranch purposes. 



EXTENT OF THE INDUSTRY. 



At the present time there are on the islands probably about 20,000 

 colonies of bees, most of which are, as above stated, owned by four 

 companies. From the custom-house statistics it is shown that the 

 annual shipments of honey amount to about 1,000 tons. The island 

 of Kauai now supports about 3,000 colonies, and, after traveling 

 over almost the entire cultivated portion of the island, the author 



