Abstract
Brazilian beekeeping has been developed from the africanization of the honeybees and its high performance launches Brazil as one of the world´s largest honey producer. The Southeastern region has an expressive position in this market (45%), but the state of Rio de Janeiro is the smallest producer, despite presenting large areas of wild vegetation for honey production. In order to analyze the honey productivity in the state of Rio de Janeiro, this research used classic and spatial regression approaches. The data used in this study comprised the responses regarding beekeeping from 1418 beekeepers distributed throughout 72 counties of this state. The best statistical fit was a semiparametric spatial model. The proposed model could be used to estimate the annual honey yield per hive in regions and to detect production factors more related to beekeeping. Honey productivity was associated with the number of hives, wild swarm collection and losses in the apiaries. This paper highlights that the beekeeping sector needs support and help to elucidate the problems plaguing beekeepers, and the inclusion of spatial effects in the regression models is a useful tool in geographical data.
Highlights
In Brazil, beekeeping has been developed from the Africanization of European honeybees (Gonçalves, 1974) and currently ranks as the 11thThe Southeastern region of Brazil is a remarkable region, providing approximately 45% of the national honey production
In order to evaluate the productivity factors, this study aims to evaluate which regression model, spatial or non-spatial, is more recomended to estimate the honey production, to reveal possible spatial clusters and the most significant factors related to the bee production
Classical and spatial analysis revealing that the data were well fitted, the semi-parametric model adjusted via thin plate spline (GAM) yielded the best overall fit (AIC = 590.62, residual sum squares (RSS) = 1865.81 and ρ = 0.886)
Summary
In Brazil, beekeeping has been developed from the Africanization of European honeybees (Gonçalves, 1974) and currently ranks as the 11th. The Southeastern region of Brazil is a remarkable region, providing approximately 45% of the national honey production. Belonging to this region, the state of Rio de Janeiro’s beekeeping sector displayed robust growth during the 1950s and 1960s, but a lack of awareness regarding the limits of the field resulted in low profitability, about 1% of the national production (FIBGE, 2009). Beekeeping surveys pointed out the increasing numbers of beekeepers, a low variety of bee products and high losses in their business as the major problems (Coapi, 1992; Lorenzon et al, 2008). In order to evaluate the productivity factors, this study aims to evaluate which regression model, spatial or non-spatial, is more recomended to estimate the honey production, to reveal possible spatial clusters and the most significant factors related to the bee production
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