Análise dos custos de produção de mel e própolis: um estudo com apicultores do Centro Oeste mineiro atendidos pelo Programa Assistência Técnica e Gerencial (ATEG) do Senar-MG

Family beekeeping plays an important role in generating income and diversifying production in rural areas, but it still has weaknesses in cost control and sales price formation. Given this, the objective of this study was to analyze the production costs of honey and propolis in family beekeeping systems, based on data from 28 beekeepers served by the Technical and Management Assistance (ATeG) program of SENAR-MG, over two production cycles. This is an applied, quantitative, descriptive, and explanatory study that used standardized field spreadsheets to survey fixed and variable costs, organized into the indicators Effective Operating Cost (EOC), Total Operating Cost (TOC), and Total Cost (TC). To address the difficulty of separating costs between joint products, the method of allocation proportional to market value was adopted, distributing the TC between honey and propolis according to each one's share in gross revenue, which allowed the average cost per kilogram to be estimated in an economically coherent manner. In the first cycle, the average cost was R$ 6.46/kg for honey and R$ 140.82/kg for propolis, while in the second cycle these values changed to R$ 5.85/kg and R$ 84.65/kg, respectively, showing gains in production efficiency, mainly due to the expansion of honey production scale and improvements in management and cost allocation. There was also a predominance of variable costs in the production structure and strong economic complementarity between honey (volume and cash flow product) and propolis (high value-added product). It is concluded that the combination of cost control, appropriate apportionment methods, and product diversification contributes to the economic sustainability of family beekeeping, offering practical support for the technical and managerial management of the producers monitored.