I know a lot of food production here is vastly more land-efficient than is historically plausible, but honey production seems a little out of balance with what’s needed for pastries. I’ve taken to carpeting a quarter of the map with apiaries, and that might be the most productive quarter of the map, for this, too! Not all of the wilderness has even a 50% honey bonus.
Three screenshots of a whole lot of tesselated apiaries
You might argue that’s an overreaction, but demand (in the form of pastries) has expanded to match it, and, in fact, apparently we’re mysteriously conjuring honey, because I’ve been at 0 honey in storage for most of the past several years, and apparently we’ve been consuming more than we’re producing!
(I don’t know what the really low production year was, but it shows up in wax production, too, so the most likely explanation is that was when I was moving apiaries around to try to pack them a little more efficiently.)
The next step is one I should have thought of sooner of literally putting clover fields under apiaries for purely the honey bonus, but the people ever hunger for pastries.
Incidentally, I remember previous builds of this game where gardens and parks provided a honey bonus. What happened to that?
The chart shows the last 7 years of production and consumption. I was at 0-20 honey for almost all of that, and, as you can see, I was apparently consuming more than I produced for that entire time.
My best guess is that pastry bakers were so desperate that they were fetching it straight out of the hives and somehow this doesn’t get logged to production metrics. (It’s the opposite of the dairy problem, where it seems to report several times the amount of milk that is actually produced if you ask the barn.) That, or there’s a data race when multiple bakers try to start at the same time and don’t all have enough materials, but that seems less likely.
IMO it’s entirely pastries. The difference in demand between that and beer is dramatic, and anything short of completely suppressing pastry production seems to make honey supplies vanish almost immediately.
It’s also deeply tragic that you can’t import honey except maybe by requesting it. (I haven’t tried it, but it seems like you can request anything, even stuff that no merchants sell.)