Beekeeping the BzB way

Fuata nyuki ule asali! Follow the honey bee!

BzB Beekeepers’ Association

BzB is a beekeeping association with over 80 hives. Our honey has:.

• A known provenance. Every jar is traceable to its apiary. Not blended from multiple sources, no ‘Blend of EU and non-EU honeys’. (Whatever that means)
• Purity. Nothing added, nothing taken away. Did you know nearly all of the honey in UK supermarkets has been imported from the Far East or Central America. Sadly it’s too often adulterated with sweeteners or cheap corn syrup….. (see article below).
• Diverse origins. BzB’s honeybees range freely, gathering nectar from a wide variety of seasonal blossoms in unspoiled woodlands and farm fields, not limited to vast mono-cultured fields like rape for example.
• Organic sources. The surrounding smallholdings are managed without chemical pesticides, weedkillers or fertilisers. The bees forage in naturally organic fields and forests.
• BzB honey is not subjected to post-collection processing by blending, heat-treatment and filtration.

Finally, the bees do a great job fertilising local smallholders’ crops as they go – an invaluable help to them.

BzB Harvesting and Marketing. BzB collects the honeycombs and separates the honey by manual centrifuge. It’s sold to local buyers.

BzB planting

BzB’s terrain

Our Beekeepers

How pure is your honey?

Jon Ungoed-Thomas, The Guardian, 09-11-2024

Nine in ten honey samples from UK retailers fail authenticity test. Call for industry reform as latest results support belief that products are being bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup

The honey industry faces new demands to overhaul its supply chain after more than 90% of sampled products bought from large British ­retailers failed pioneering authenticity tests. The UK branch of the Honey Authenticity Network sent 30 samples last month from Britain for a novel commercial test based on the DNA profiles of genuine honey. Five were from UK beekeepers and 25 from big retailers, including supermarkets. The tests found that 24 out of the 25 jars of honey from retailers were considered suspicious. All five samples from UK beekeepers were considered to be genuine.

Honey importers in the UK and some experts challenge the reliability of such testing, but this is the latest batch of tests suggesting what may be widespread adulteration in the honey supply chain, with some products suspected of being bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup. The British Honey Importers and Packers Association (BHIPA) said a “weight of evidence” assessment must be used to safeguard the ­supply chain. It said the “vast majority” of UK-sold honey was of very high standard. An EU investigation published last year found 46% of imported sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent, including all 10 honey samples from the UK.

The EU is working on advanced testing techniques to detect honey fraud and has passed new legislation to provide improved labelling of country of origin on jars of honey. Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.” The UK is one of the biggest importers of cheap Chinese honey, which is known to be targeted by fraudsters. Honey importers say supply chains and provenance are carefully audited, but there has been no consensus on how technical tests should be applied, or which are most reliable.

The Celvia research institute in Estonia, which is partly owned by the University of Tartu, developed its novel methodology for honey DNA test with support from the EU’s European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. The DNA composition of the honey is compared against a database of more than 500 genuine honeys, with about half of these from Estonia.Kaarel Krjutškov, director of the Celvia laboratory, said he considered the testing was robust, in the face of criticism from other experts that the honey database was not sufficiently comprehensive and that one test was not enough to establish adulteration. The Celvia analysis examines between 10m and 20m DNA sequences in honey samples, with machine learning used to detect deviations from profiles of authentic reference honeys. “It is surprisingly easy to distinguish between the fake and authentic products,” said Krjutškov. “It is a huge gap.”

How can beekeeping help climate change?

There is an immense temptation to increase farmland by felling natural woodland. The appetite of developed nations plays a major part in this. We consume great quantities of palm-oil, beef and corn. All of these need huge acreages of land. The developing nations meeting this demand have little incentive to husband the soil – when it’s exhausted it’s much quicker and cheaper to move on, cut down more forests for a quick timber payoff, plant crops anew and leave a barren dustbowl behind.

More demanding, but more sustainable, would be to increase the output of the farmland already claimed. Beekeeping is one part of that effort. A small part, but every little helps.

All about bees