Yesterday morning I watched an article on the BBC about Turkish honey bees and honey production. Presented by Michaela Strachan.
While this article presented well the plight of the Tukish beekeepers following wildfires, Michaela made a statement (im paraphrasing here) that commercial beekeepers normally just bulk feed glucose to their bees rather than let them forage on flowers, etc.
I cant comment on Turkish practices, though there certainly is a degree of adulteration of honey in Turkey, however I would like to make it clear here that her comments should have explicitly pointed out "In Turkey". Here in the UK I know many commercial bee farmers, none of which adulterate their honey. It is illegal in the UK and most other countries in the world to sell as honey sugar syrups that are processed by bees. In the UK the vast majority of beekeepers are passionate about producing real honey.
In the UK the 2015 Honey Regulations state clearly:
"honey” means the natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature.
Here at Brinkworth Apiaries, we pride ourselves on managing our bees and producing delicious unadulterated pure honey.
While we use sugars to provide a source of food for the bees over winter this is purely to prevent starvation of our bees during winter and early spring when there is no natural food source available.
In the spring just before the bees start gathering an excess of nectar to produce honey we then remove any surplus food the have (as this may contain traces of sugar) The frames that are removed are used as food for developing new colonies of bees and strictly not for human use.
This approach allows us to be as sure as we possibly can be that our honey is pure and the only way sugar can get into our honey is by the bees finding some in the natural environment (which, where we are, is highly unlikely).
We also periodically have our honey independatly tested ( you will find test results on our blog) the results have always come back as clear, containing no sugar contamination or chemical contamination.
In addition , we will soon have pollen samples from all our honey, which we will store long term, so not only can we demonstrate our honey purity but we will also be able to identify what each colony of bees has foraged on and what source (or sources) each jar of honey is from.
In the coming weeks we will be posting blogs on showing how we do this.
Honey Regulations
Turkish Honey Adulteration
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