photo courtesy of autan

This is honey:

“Honey is a supersaturated solution of sugars, mainly fructose, glucose, and maltose-like sugars, with traces of sucrose, glucose oxidase, hydrogen peroxide, phenolics, flavonoids, terpenes, etc. (12). The sugars make honey hygroscopic (moisture absorbing) and viscous, and the sugar concentration plus other factors including low pH, hydrogen peroxide, and the flavonoids, phenolics and terpenes make honey antimicrobial or prevent microbial growth..”

What honey is

Honey seems like such a good thing – one of those substances of life that can’t possibly have any downside. Sweet AND antimicrobial? What’s not to like? Well, we have a problem in this country with honey and that is the sheer amount of honey that is imported into this country. The two top exporters of honey in the world are Turkey and China – the place where most large commercial packagers in the US get their honey is from China.

And this is a huge problem.

Seattle P_I Investigates Honey Laundering

“Two-thirds of the honey Americans consume is imported and almost half of that, regardless of what’s on the label, comes from China," the Seattle P-I reported last month.

The newspaper’s five-month investigation into honey laundering — the intentional mislabeling of the country of origin — found that tons of Chinese honey coming into the U.S. is tainted with banned antibiotics. But when the contamination is discovered by the industry through internal testing, insiders say, federal health or customs officials are almost never notified, and the honey ends up being dumped back on the market.”

Testimony from federal investigators and informants offer a glimpse into a typical deal: Wolff (a German import/export house) sold Chinese honey to a U.S. honey producer. The packer tested the shipment and found traces of antibiotics. Wolff took the honey back and resold it to another packer who didn’t test for contaminants.

If convicted, the Wolff executives face up to five years in prison for conspiring to falsify country of origin on the Chinese shipments.

In its series, the P-I reported that it had received shipping papers showing that Chinese honey, falsely labeled as a product of India, was sold to several U.S. honey packers, including one of the nation’s largest — Sue Bee Honey Association.”

Excuse me – Sue Bee? We’re talking “Mom and Apple Pie” here – their ‘queen shaped’ jars are on every grocer’s shelves in America. Sue Bee is buying up Chinese honey – falsely labeled as to origin? Now, why would Chinese producers want people to think that their honey came from someplace else?

Let’s see now…how many news stories about tainted food (both animal and human) produced in China have come out in the past couple of years? How many stories about people who have gotten sick or died from consuming Chinese food products in the past couple of years? The most recent stories are about infant formula that has killed tens of Chinese babies and about processed spring rolls poisoning Japanese. The Chinese government is very concerned about their image here – but their answer is to execute factory executives and a government minister, not fix the problem.

So, what is Sue Bee doing about their problem?

“Bill Allibone, Sue Bee’s president, said the company has no intention of telling government regulators about the bad honey it finds. It’s not really Sue Bee’s honey, he said, "because technically, it’s still (the importer’s) property until we pay for it. "We have not notified the FDA in the past because we don’t have title to that property," Allibone said.”

Yep, that’s right up there with “This won’t hurt a bit” and “The check is in the mail”. Sue Bee does not care enough about what happens to the customers who eat their honey – or the other members of their cooperative that supply them, either, since now THEY and their reputations are tainted with this. Will US beekeepers who are in the Sue Bee Association (it’s a coop, like DairyLea) be able to see their honey to anyone else?

But, I mean, it’s just a spoonful of honey, right? No one can really be hurt by just a spoonful of honey (of course, the same could be said of a piece of sushi but if you are like Jeremy Piven and eat it daily, sometimes more than once, the exposure can get really bad)?

“John Fratti, a former pharmacy representative from Hummelstown, Pa., also has severe sensitivity to the drugs Chinese beekeepers were using.
"Allowing even the slightest chance that these antibiotics and other drugs can end up in honey on our store shelves is criminal," Fratti said. "You can’t begin to imagine the pain and harm that can come to us sensitive to those drugs."

So, is anyone out there protecting consumers from adulterated honey?
No. Not the USDA. Not the National Honey Board. The packers like Sue Bee now refuse to pay or take title to shipments of honey before they test. If it’s contaminated, they just send it back to the importer – ‘not our problem’ – and the importer just finds another packer who does not test..or whose testing is not very good.

And what if the one part of the shipment that is sampled by a packer like Sue Bee is not contaminated, or not contaminated enough to show up on tests? Then a packer buys the shipment and puts it in with the rest and it all gets mixed in with the local honey the packer buys and then put into those packages on your store shelves, to be bought and used by consumers.

Another thing to think about though is that honey is not just used for food. We raise bees and once sold a five gallon pail of our honey to a local soap and cosmetics manufacturer. Honey is actually a great ingredient for that sort of use because it is hygroscopic – it’s a great natural moisturizer. But if we are selling to someone like that, so are the importers – and it would not surprise me if an importer, faced with a refused shipment of contaminated honey, would offload that on a manufacturer who was not producing something that people put in their mouths..but would put on their bodies. And we all know that contaminants can enter the body through the skin.

Not good.

So, as a consumer and a honey producer, here is what I would suggest:

1) Find a local beekeeper or local beekeepers.

2) Ask them what they feed their bees? Are they supplementing and what are they using? Sugar water? High fructose corn syrup? Corn syrup and water? Pollen cakes – from where? Soy cakes – from where?

3) Do they take their bees on trucks to other states? That stresses the bees – not good for health.

4) Buy local and from a clean source – we use sugar water and don’t feed protein supplements. We grow extra things like buckwheat to keep the bees going during ‘flower dry spells’ in the summer.

It always pay to think about not only where your food comes from, but also where the inputs to that food came from.

See also:
Where Have All The Bees Gone? More Information on Colony Collapse