Continuous rain brings losses in three aspects. Ni Zhifang of Shimen Village, Changshan Township, Wucheng District, started beekeeping at the age of 18. She is now 50 years old and has been keeping bees for 32 years.
When meeting reporters, Ni Zhifang kept complaining: "Beekeeping is a business that depends on the weather. This year is the worst weather I have encountered in all my years of beekeeping! All colleagues in the industry have suffered losses. The only difference is how much they have lost."
Question." Ni Zhifang has raised more than 140 boxes of bees, which is a medium-sized beekeeping household.
He said that the losses caused by bad weather to farmers mainly come from three parts.
One is the decrease in the number of bees.
Bees are very hygienic and never defecate in the hive.
But the constant rainy days and low temperatures prevent bees from going out.
"As soon as they fly out, their wings get wet, and they often fall to the ground and freeze to death." Bees unable to go out have to hold their excrement in their stomachs, which can easily lead to bloating and death.
At the same time, too low temperatures also affect the reproduction of bees.
At this time last year, it took 60 to 80 days for a honeycomb bee to produce a full box of bees. However, this year it is estimated that it will take at least 20 days later to reach this scale.
If the rainy weather continues, the breeding season will be delayed.
The second is the increase in costs.
At this time in previous years, the rapeseed flowers were already blooming.
But this year, with low temperatures and rainy weather, the flowering period of rapeseed flowers was delayed, leaving bees nowhere to collect nectar. Farmers had to feed bees artificially.
The feed fed is mainly pollen and white sugar.
Taking a box of bees as an example, from this year to early March, Ni Zhifang added 1.5 to 2.5 kilograms of pollen and more than 10 kilograms of sugar to each box of bees, which is equivalent to an increase of 130 to 140 yuan in raising costs for each box of bees.
This alone adds more than 10,000 yuan to the cost of 140 boxes of bees.
The third is a reduction in output.
Beekeepers' income mainly comes from honey and royal jelly.
Without flower sources, bees collect nectar and become sourceless water; royal jelly is the food for bees to breed larvae. Adult bees themselves are weak due to nutritional problems and cannot reproduce normally, so there is no royal jelly production.
At this time in previous years, Ni Zhifang's bees had already begun to produce honey and royal jelly, but this year he did not harvest a drop of royal jelly, which was another loss of more than 10,000 yuan.
Ni Zhifang said: "This increase and two decreases conservatively estimate the loss to be more than 20,000 yuan." The economic loss of beekeepers in Jinhua City is 19.08 million yuan. In the Jinhua Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Bureau, we have received calls from beekeepers almost every day in the past 20 days.
Emergency call.
Jinhua City is a major bee-producing city. The total number of bees raised accounts for 1/4 of the province. Currently, there are more than 5,500 people engaged in bee breeding in the city. The number of bees raised is 288,700 groups, and the annual output value is 293 million yuan.
Currently, the number of bee colonies in counties and cities is only half of what it was at the same time last year.
According to statistics, there are more than 53,000 bee colonies raised by households that have lost bees in the city, and the average bee loss rate is 45%.
If calculated at 800 yuan per hive of bees, this year's extreme weather caused direct economic losses of 19.08 million yuan to our city's bees.
"These are only the situations reported by farmers who have joined the Bee Industry Association. Continuous low temperatures and rainy weather have caused heavy losses to our city's beekeeping industry," said Hua Qiyun, secretary-general of the City's Bee Industry Association.
Hua Qiyun introduced that beekeeping is mostly based on on-site breeding and open-air breeding, and basically relies on the weather. Good or bad weather directly affects beekeeping harvests, and it is a high-risk industry.
To this end, at the end of 2007, the Municipal Bee Industry Association organized 200 beekeepers from Dongyang, Wuyi, Jindong, Wucheng and other places to formulate a targeted "Jinhua Beekeeping Risk Relief Measures" and set up a risk relief fund.
Half of the risk relief fund comes from the membership fees paid by beekeepers, and the other half comes from the Provincial Bee Industry Association.
"However, the "Measures" stipulate that the scope of application of risk relief funds only includes sudden natural disasters such as floods and fires, and car accidents during transportation, and does not include long-term low temperature and rain. Because half of the funds for the relief fund come from the Provincial Bee Industry Association
, the provincial association does not modify it, and the municipal association cannot modify the scope of application. "In Hua Qiyun's view, the most feasible way to reduce the risk of beekeepers is to implement policy-based agricultural insurance.
For example, he said that in recent years, the government has introduced various policies and measures to protect and stabilize the healthy development of the animal husbandry industry, among which sows, dairy cows, etc. have successively implemented policy insurance.
For example, for the insurance of reproductive sows, the insurance amount for each sow is 1,000 yuan, and the insurance premium is 60 yuan.
Except for less developed counties and island counties, 20% of the 60 yuan premium is borne by the provincial finance, 60% by the local finance, and 20% or 12 yuan by the breeders.
If bees are also included in policy insurance and the insurance premiums are mainly shared by the provincial, local finance and beekeepers, beekeepers' ability to resist risks will be greatly enhanced.
In 2010, heavy snowfall and low temperature and rainy weather in the south also caused considerable losses to beekeepers. The Bee Industry Association negotiated with relevant insurance companies on the issue of bees participating in agricultural insurance, but in the end nothing happened.
Beekeepers hope that beekeeping will be included in the scope of policy agricultural insurance, but for many poultry farmers, the low compensation standards of policy agricultural insurance have become a worry for them.
In 2009, Wuyi County began to implement policy agricultural insurance for the poultry industry, and Zhong Feide, a broiler farmer in Wuyi County, also insured.
But over the past few years, Zhong Feide and his colleagues have gradually chosen to withdraw from insurance.
Zhong Feide said that this is because everyone thinks that the compensation of policy agricultural insurance is low.