Rural entrepreneurship plays a vital role in rural development. The path of rural prosperity can be carved through the successful ventures in the rural areas. This paper explores the growth determinants of beekeeping ventures in India. For data collection, a pre-structured questionnaire was administered in the local language among the beekeepers in Punjab. Venture age is found to be positively related to the expansion of the beekeeping ventures. Expansion leads to a number of benefits in the long run, ranging from the scale of operations to lesser financial problems. Venture age is also found to be associated with the building of the brand for selling honey. The findings of the study offer value to academicians and policy makers for understanding the rural ventures in a better manner and planning interventions for the sustenance and promotion of the self-employment opportunities in the rural areas.

Entrepreneurship is the mechanism of wealth creation in the society. The importance of the entrepreneurial function for economic development has been widely acknowledged in the literature (Baumol, 1968; Leibenstein, 1968; Casson, 1990, Homaday, 1990; and Hamilton and Harper, 1994). Growth of entrepreneurial activity is the precondition for the overall growth of the economy (Iyigun and Owen, 1998; and Aquilina et al., 2006). New ventures are created to satisfy the unmet consumer need with the purpose of achieving profit and growth (Normann, 1977; Gartner, 1985; and Sandberg, 1986). Small business ventures are considered important for their contribution to economic development and employment generation (Bernice and Meredith, 1997; and Yuzbasioglu, 1997). Small businesses are the tools for combating poverty in the developing countries (Wolfenson, 2001). Multidimensional characteristics and diversity in the field of entrepreneurship ensure that the body of knowledge and the related theories remain far from adequate in spite of the quantum of exploration and research (Storey, 1994; Delmar, 1997; Ardishvili et al., 1998; and Wiklund 1998). Investigating the critical factors affecting the performance of entrepreneurial venture is an assiduous task, as the variable under the study is influenced by numerous factors ranging from the characteristics of the venture, the personal factors related to the entrepreneur, the strategy being employed, and the environmental conditions.

Knowing about the performance of a business is a critical issue in business management. Current performance of the business is instrumental in strategic choices such as infusion of capital, technology change, and structural changes. Current business performance normally exhibits effectiveness and quality of past decisions and actions. Business is a set of diverse and complex activities requiring numerous trade-offs between competing and conflicting variables. Therefore, the measurement of business performance can prove to be quite cumbersome. There is a whole range of measures of business performance. The diversity of the measures ranges from using pure financial indicators such as Return on Investment (ROI) and profitability, refined models such as Activity-Based Costing (ABC) and Economic Value-Added (EVA), and the techniques recognizing the importance of non-financial measures as in the case of Balanced Scorecard.

Entrepreneurship Development Journal, Multidimensional, Activity-Based Costing (ABC), Economic Value-Added (EVA), Return on Investment (ROI), Indian Beekeeping Scenario, Perseverance Pays, Venture Age, Indian Beekeeping Ventures.