Hello Everyone,
Happy “Halfway through the year” Month!
Is it me or is this year absolutely flying along?! Feels like only yesterday I was cracking the hives open for the first time, and yet since that fateful day I’ve created an abundance of Queens & Nucleus Colonies, relocated several bumblebee nests, collected quite a few swarms from you lovely people, among a bunch of other less impressive stuff. Crazy how time works.
ANYWAY….
I put a post on my Social Media Pages asking what you would like me to write about next and the winner was “Why is local honey better than supermarket honey?”.
It’s a question that I get asked a lot; usually in conjunction with “does local honey stop you from getting hay fever?”
Fortunately, both questions are super easy to answer:
Q1: “Why is local honey better than supermarket honey?”.
A1: Because supermarket honey should be named Franken-honey due to amount it is processed, whereas us local beekeepers only roughly sieve our honey, so it’s as close as you can get to fresh honey in the comb minus the wax but, more importantly, with all the unadulterated goodness still present.
Q2: “Does local honey stop you from getting hay fever?”
A2: Nope, not at all and there’s no research proving so…. It’s a great tagline to sell honey though!
There we go, blog post done! Phew, that was easy! Time to clock off and go mess with the bees some more.
What do you mean “that’s not much of an answer?” …
Fine, I’ll go into more detail. I’ll even throw in a Manuka rant at the end for good measure. To explain why local honey is better, you need to ask the following questions first:
What is supermarket honey and where does it come from?
Supermarket honey is the bane of all British beekeepers. The stuff they provide is cheap, sweet, and always available. I’ve spoken to several OAPs (Over Active Pensioners) that have only ever tasted store bought honey throughout their whole lives. This is quite common and generally means that when you think of how honey tastes, you automatically think of that overly sweet syrup with a familiar amber colouring. Sometimes people say “I don’t like honey” because this is the stuff that they are thinking of.
But this isn’t how ‘actual’ honey tastes. I say ‘actual’ because supermarket honey is made by blending honey from all over the world together. This normally wouldn’t be a problem because it’s just a way of homogenising a product, so that every jar tastes the same, time and time again. The reason it's a problem here is that much of the honey purchased by supermarket chains predominantly comes from China, India and Vietnam, although you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the label. According to government rules, country of origin doesn’t need to be stated on honey that is blended. You usually get “blend of non-EU honeys” somewhere near the barcode instead.
There is a lot of controversy when it comes to honey from China. In the past few years, it has come out that a lot of exported Chinese honey is bulked out with high fructose sugar syrup (AKA corn syrup). Honey is composed of at least 181 components. Its unique taste is a result of complex chemical processes, which is why sugary syrup substitutes just can’t compare. Honey is composed mostly of the sugar’s glucose and fructose but the pollen in raw honey gives it a distinctive flavour other than the simple sweetness that the sugar syrup gives. Another issue with bulking out the honey is that all you are getting is sugar and no goodness in the form of proteins, enzymes and minerals, which is what makes honey so good for you. The problem is so bad that American beekeepers sued their country’s largest honey importer due to the adulterated honey driving them into financial ruin (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/01/us-beekeepers-sue-over-imports-of-asian-fake-honey). It’s got so well known that Chinese honey can be dodgy that recently testing is required on all barrels to check authenticity.
“So, if honey is being tested now, that means there’s no more fake stuff on the market, right?” I hear you think…
Nope!
Unfortunately, there are factories in China now advertising sugar syrup for sale to be mixed with honey (which is claimed in marketing material) that can beat the most common tests used by food safety watchdogs.
So, in short, supermarket honey is made up of honey from different origins and a good probability of corn syrup is in there to help bulk it out.
Why does supermarket honey have such a large shelf life?
Honey in general, if kept in its base state, can pretty much last forever as long as it isn’t attacked by moisture, so naturally each jar has a shelf life on the label of around 5 years or more because “forever” would look a bit odd. But as mentioned above, supermarket honey is possibly mixed with sugar syrup which can mess with the chemistry of the product. To stop this from causing any issues, supermarkets heavily process their product before putting it on the shelf to make it as inert as possible.
After blending, the supermarkets need to make sure that the honey stays runny for longer. All honey crystallises over time, it doesn’t mean it’s gone off, just means you need to gently warm it up for an hour or so to return to its liquid form (I’ll explain how to do this on a social media post at some point). Crystallisation would cost the supermarkets thousands, if not millions in man hours alone of warming up pallets every month or so. The pollen in honey acts as a launching pad for crystallisation to start and therefore honey that has particularly high concentrations of pollen such as oil seed rape honey, sets very quickly. Pollen is not only a great source of protein, but it is absolutely jam packed with vitamins and minerals our bodies love.
Supermarkets retard the crystallisation process by pushing the honey through a super fine (~5 microns) sieve. Pollen grains vary in size from about 5 to 200 microns (µm), meaning that the bulk of the pollen is usually removed leaving only the liquid part of the honey. To put it into context, the finest sieve size that I use is 60 microns which is only to reduce the amount of wax that you may get in a jar. Some pollen may be removed but it’s usually much less than 1%, meaning that you get all the goodness and unique flavour the plants in Rainford provide unchanged.
After filtration, the supermarket honey is then heat treated to kill any natural bacteria such as yeasts that can ruin the product via fermentation. Honey will not ferment normally unless it is attacked by humidity, but due to the possibility of syrup in the mix and the pollen being removed, all of the chemistry in the supermarket honey has been changed making it more susceptible to infection. Unfortunately, the heat treating not only kills the bacteria but also denatures all of the beneficial enzymes and proteins within the honey, meaning that our body can’t use them.
At the end of processing, the supermarkets may be left with a homogeneous product that has a very long shelf life, but they have literally turned it into a sweetener with very little beneficial components and almost removed or destroyed everything that actually makes it ‘honey’.
Are there any benefits to supermarket honey?
This is a question that a lot of people miss out because the answer doesn’t fit with the “supermarket honey = bad” tag line that has garnered so much attention of late and I want to always make sure that I’m giving as unbiased an opinion as possible.
There are a couple of benefits for supermarket honey that I can think of.
The first is the quantity and availability of the stuff. 43,000 tons of honey per year is consumed in the UK alone.
To put that into context, my strongest and best hive this year is currently on 4 honey supers (boxes where the bees store honey for me to extract). Each box holds about 10-12Kg of honey when completely full. So, with some solid ‘bee maths’ (dodgy at best), it would require the UK to have around 1,092,250 beehives working at full capacity every year to supply the nation with honey…
The largest bee farmer in the UK is the queen’s beekeeper, Murray MacGregor, with a whopping 4000 hives in Aberdeenshire. So that means 273 Murrays are required to keep us going. Unfortunately, Murray alone has the experience, backing and support to do so well in the UK. Most other bee farmers don’t reach over 1000 hives and you can probably count the ones that do on your hands.
The issues are that the season isn’t long enough in the UK, the weather is tenuous at best (he says looking outside one minute to bright sunlight and torrential thunderous rain the next) and the forage on our little island just can’t support the honey demand. I would absolutely love for the UK to produce its own unfiltered honey to fulfil its own demand but it’s just not viable.
Saying that though, I do believe we can do better. Currently 95% of the honey demand in the UK is fulfilled by import . The main reason for it only being 5% is that people would rather buy cheap ‘Franken-honey’ in the supermarket than buy the more expensive stuff from their local beekeeper at farmers markets even though it contains virtually unprocessed raw honey with all of the beneficial proteins, enzymes, bacteria and vitamins left in.
The second benefit to cheap supermarket honey is that you don’t feel bad putting it in your coffee or tea. Even supermarket honey is better for you and the environment than granulated sugar. But that is a completely different conversation about monoculture altogether!
Conclusion
So, there you have it. I hope that answered the question of “Why is local honey better than supermarket honey?”
At the end of the day, there is another reason why you should buy local honey and the answer to that is the same as why you should buy local in general. Your local beekeepers, like me, need as much of your support as possible, as not only are we putting lots of effort into providing our communities with the very best honey you can buy but our bees are the ones pollinating your plants and crops, and improving your local biodiversity. (See previous blog post about this here)
If you’re still reading to find out more about my Manuka rant then carry on, but I have realised that this is more of a personal pet peeve of mine rather than anything to do with the subject of this post. But as it has to do with doctoring honey, I feel it is still relevant enough to mention.
What is the deal with Manuka honey?!
Everything to do with Manuka honey really annoys me. I may be a honey snob or just a grumpy weirdo but I think it’s all gone a bit daft.
Manuka honey can only be produced in specific places where there is a surplus of Manuka flowers. There are only two places in the entire world that fit this requirement, one is a small spot in New Zealand and the other is in Tasmania.
The locations are usually quite remote, requiring beehives to be helicoptered into the area, but don’t think anyone can do this, as these locations are well jealously guarded, lest too many people harvest it, with a strange Manuka mafia style warfare occurring from time to time with poisonings, arsons and thefts. The rarity of this specific flora and the territorial harvesters means that a maximum of 2800 tonnes of Manuka honey can be produced every year...
Hopefully you can realise that 2800 tonnes, in itself, cannot supply the entire world, which consumes 10,000 tonnes of specifically Manuka honey annually. Almost every supermarket in the western world has jars of Manuka for sale at extortionate prices. You also have health food shops and online stores that have it for sale too. That’s right, I can hear you ponder how 2800 tonnes is stretched to make up the demand.
The answer is: it can’t...
Sure, some of it may be simply fake Manuka; possibly just normal honey labelled incorrectly or some of the earlier mentioned Chinese syrup. But The New Zealand government’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) created the first global standard and scientific definition for Manuka Honey in early 2018. It is the only government-regulated and approved standard for Manuka Honey in the world.
One website states:
“All honey labelled as Manuka and exported from New Zealand is required to be tested to show that it meets the MPI standard before it can lawfully be exported. The test results from the certifying lab must accompany the export documents for the Manuka honey ensuring that the product packed in New Zealand is genuine.”
So, there you go, just look for the certificate, right?... sadly no…
The problem is that this testing only affects the honey as it leaves New Zealand to go to other countries. What happens outside of New Zealand doesn’t really matter to them because it was pure on their end and there’s certification to prove it. The majority of Manuka honey available on the market is noted as a “Manuka Blend” on the label. Meaning that the sellers are following in the supermarket’s trail, blending the Manuka with other honeys (and usually processing them in the same way as mentioned above for longer shelf life).
“How much Manuka is needed to be called a Manuka blend?” I hear you ask.
Well it only needs to be 50% pure Manuka honey to pass the aforementioned tests and still retain the title “Manuka Honey”… which isn’t great to begin with…
For Manuka blend, there isn’t really an official low limit, just “less than 30%” so you could be paying extortionate amounts for something that only has like 1% Manuka in it! Put it this way, it could be virtually the same product as aforementioned ‘franken-honey’, but it costs £10 rather than 72p.
So, if all of this faff has occurred, Manuka honey must be worth it, right? Does it grant you the ability to fly? No… Shoot lasers out of your eyes? Nope… Does it heal all wounds? Nuhuh… Cure all diseases? Not at all, sorry.
“Then what…” I hear you ask in exacerbation (although it might just be me at this point) “… might make you pay such an extortionate amount for honey that is no better?”
Manuka honey has antibacterial properties along with antiviral, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits. The pure stuff, or rather the 50+% stuff “may” help treat ailments including irritable bowel syndrome, gastric ulcers, periodontal disease and upper respiratory infections.
The problem for me is that there are already medicines developed that can do this, that don’t cost a fortune (in the UK at least) and are guaranteed to work rather than a jar of something that will probably be at least 50% of the active ingredient, that “may” help…
Now, I’m best mentioning that if you’re dead set on getting proper Manuka honey, then you should look out for the MGO (Methylglyoxal) grading system on the label. Scientists generally agree that MGO is the best way to establish a honey's antimicrobial (bacteria killing) strength and it’s the best method of figuring out how much Manuka is actually in the jar you’re paying a lot of money for. Please be aware that the higher the Manuka amount then the more expensive it gets, and you’ll still be only getting a small amount of Manuka in the grand scheme of things.
It also doesn’t help us local beekeepers, whose honey is much better for you than most of the Manuka stuff on the market and yet we still get comments like “I can buy Manuka honey for that price!” on the market stall.
So yeah… please don’t buy Manuka honey, it’s REALLY not worth it.
Rant over
I hope you’re all safe and well
Greg