Jointness in Sites: The Case of Migratory Beekeeping

This paper formulates a bio-economic model that specifies the sequentiality of allocative choice on a migratory beekeeping farm in discrete form. It is assumed that the modeled farm operates in conditions of certainty and, allocating an apiary to forage sites, produces only two marketable outputs: commercial pollination service and honey. The biological connotation of this model is derived from the fact that the apiary outputs are specified as functions of the number of adult bees active on the pollinated sites. The bio-economic model determines revenues, variable costs, gross income and profits of a migratory beekeeping farm for each sequence of forage sites to be pollinated, i.e. for each practicable sitechronological regime. The bio-economic model allows the existence of jointness in sites to be tested, i.e. to ascertain if the sequential allocative choices are independent. The jointness in the forage sites can arise on the side of the revenues, on that of the variable costs or on both sides simultaneously. This bio-economic model formulated for migratory beekeeping farms is convertible to other farming activities involving transhumance, such as the grazing or rearing of livestock.