(Photos.com)
Beekeepers transport their hives from field to field and make money helping farmers, orchardists and others pollinate their crops. (See the wonderful old paper by Steven N.S. Cheung, “The Fable of the Bees: An Economic Investigation,” Journal of Law and Economics, 1973.)
There are now indications that colony collapse, the current plague of the industry, may result from too-frequent moves of hives and the resulting greater exposure to more varieties of pathogens. The beekeeper thus faces a trade-off: increase revenue by moving hives around, but incur a potential cost of collapse; or move hives less and make less revenue, but reduce the potential risk. From what I’ve been told, different beekeepers make different choices, depending in part on their assessments of the risk of colony collapse and their degree of risk aversion.
[HT: SK-L]
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Daniel,
The November 1918 Popular Mechanics Magazine has this article:
Wholesale Death of Bees Due to Poisoned Flowers
There is also the externality of a hive returning with new pathogens that can infect bees that stayed at home. Can someone please call Coase to get this bee related problem sorted? http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Coase_World.html
Move less, charge more.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
6 
1
There is an analogous situation in the production of oil and gas – the fast or ‘harder’ oil or gas is produced the shorter the economic lifespan of the well itself. In this case it’s a simple matter of physics. The real hidden issue though, is that as we bounce these wells around in response to economics, we damage them and that causes a shortened lifetime of the well. So the reserves people talk about may be calculated on a volumetric basis, but they are smaller – and potentially far smaller – when looked at from an economic lifetime of the well.
Many zones of oil or gas actually have a layer of salt water in the same reservoir or zone, but we have learned how to ‘bring the well in’ such that the water is left behind. Pulling or producing a well faster than it’s ideal rate will cause that salt water to be pulled into the stream and will then have to be disposed of. That salt water will be toxic and disposal will be expensive, lowering the economic life of the well.
In other cases where salt water may or may not be present, the formation is already simply hard for oil and gas to travel through. Shale and chalk are two examples. To envision this process imagine you have a swimming pool with a drain at the deep end and filled with flattened newspaper. Now begin filling the pool at the top on the opposite end from the drain – typically the shallow end. If you could see through the sides of the pool you can imagine how long it might take for the first drop of liquid to make it to the deep end and then to the drain. If the drain represents the oil or gas well bore, then this stuff is produced relatively slowly but more to the point if you pulled a vacuum on the drain what would happen? The closest liquid would come to it faster, but along the way the newspaper would collapse just the slightest and therefor later liquids will find it harder to move through and into the well.
So every time I hear that OPEC or whomever has unlimited reserves and they are producing more oil to meet economic demands I ask myself if they really care about the economic life of the well. Just like the economic life of the bees.
So there’s a relationship between how many different people the bee keeper does business with and how likely the bee keeper is of contracting a disease.
Gosh, if only there were some other profession that faced a similar trade-off, maybe we could learn from it….
Daniel, can you offer any citations or sources for this info? As a beekeeper and beekeeping newsletter editor, I’d like to follow it up.