What the road brings

A farm stand and a hive full of honey are not the same kind of constraint. The colonies decide how much honey exists; the road decides how much of it a stand can turn into cash on any given day. Passers-by are a fixed, slow trickle: a certain number of cars, a fraction noticing the sign, a smaller fraction willing to stop. No amount of honey behind the stand makes more of them drive past it.

That is the whole shape of a roadside stand everywhere: modest, steady volume, above the wholesale price, capped by traffic rather than by the crop. A big harvest does not sell itself faster; it sits longer, waiting its turn.

In this game the stand takes about 1.5 kilos of honey a day at the going rate, rising in summer and falling well under a kilo in winter. Forty kilos is weeks of that trickle.