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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Bee keeping and the Beehaus

August 10, 2009

Monday mornings are never the most cheerful time of the week, but mine are often brightened up by perusing our list of the previous week’s fast moving search terms. This morning the term that brought a smile to my face was ‘beehaus’, the name of a trendy new beehive aimed at attracting more people to the world of bee keeping. Not only is this is a clever pun, it was also the fastest moving search term within our Shopping and Classifieds category last week.

Bees are very much in the news at the moment, with a recent book and Natural England report attracting a lot of attention. It seems as if the worldwide concern about dwindling bee populations (and the potentially catastrophic results if the decline continues) is encouraging more people to consider keeping bees. As chart below illustrates, UK Internet searches for a range of bee- and bees-related terms have gone up over the last year, and increased to their highest ever level last week.

UK_Internet_searches_for_bees_beehives_beehaus_2009_2008_2007_chart.png

It’s interesting to note that there were more searches for the Beehaus than any of the generic terms. This is also reflected in the website traffic; Omlet, the company that makes the Beehaus (as well as other animal houses), consistently receives more visits than the British Beekeepers’ Association homepage. However, as you can see from the chart below, both sites are experiencing an increase in traffic at the moment.

UK_Internet_visits_to_the_omlet_and_British_Beekeepers_Association_homepages_chart.png

So, has all the media attention encouraged more hip young things to follow Scarlett Johansson’s example and take up urban bee keeping? Looking at the Experian Mosaic lifestyle data for Omlet website, it seems like there’s still a way to before bee hives and chicken coops are a common sight in British cities. The table below illustrates the Mosaic types that currently over index as visitors to Omlet UK. The top 20 is dominated by rural rather than urban Mosaic groups, in particular K – Rural Isolation (defined as “People living in rural areas where country life has not been influenced by urban consumption patterns”).