Scandal of the Phoney Honey

On National Honey Day, Bill Anderson attacks the shocking new production method where bees never see a flower

As we celebrate National Honey Day by uninhibitedly gorging on extra spoonfuls of its natural sweetness, our eyes may be caught by the sight of flowers printed on the label of the jar.

If we’ve stumped up more cash, the jar might even be illustrating a specific flower – “single origin” honey with the unique flavour of its monofloral source – orange blossom, thyme, lavender, mint or heather silently triggering all our other senses to transport us back to the bucolic sunshine of summer.

But only 10% of the honey we consume in the UK is produced here – and much of that 90% imported honey we buy in our supermarkets has some small print behind its eye-catching label helpfully explaining that the contents of the jar are a “blend of EU/non-EU/EU and non-EU honeys”*.

A huge but non-specified proportion of this blend comes from China where bees are kept on a truly industrial scale.

Conventional beekeeping is geared to maximising honey yield for the honey farmer, and its method of farming the honey relies principally on the use of wooden frames inside hives. This system, patented by the Reverend William Langstroth in 1852, delivers profit margins that would have been impressive in the late 1800s.

Natural beekeepers may profoundly disagree with some of the more interventionist, less bee-friendly methods of wooden framed beekeeping, but at least the honey from all our hives is still created by bees visiting flowers.

Now a new 21st century method of honey farming is spreading, in secret, across the world.

We are all familiar with intensive farming processes like sheds full of battery hens or cramped gestation crates for pigs, and the objective of these methods is clear – protein conversion: the cheap protein in feed is converted to more marketable protein in the farmed animal for a profitable margin.

With honeybees the profit is not in protein conversion but sugar inversion: as honest producers of golden syrup will ruefully tell you, however well they invert sugar from beet into syrup with a mellifluous consistency, they can never charge the consumer the premium price that honey commands. While syrup producers use acid hydrolysis to invert sugar in their industrial vats, honeybees use a natural enzyme invertase in the conversion of floral nectar into honey inside the hive.

Cutting-edge industrial honey farmers confine huge numbers of hives inside vast bee-tight sheds into which cheap, refined sugar solution is pumped for the bees to take inside their hives and invert. The bees never leave the shed. They never see or taste a flower. They never see the sun: “daylight” inside the sealed shed is manipulated to maximise the production of… honey?

The inversion the bees are labouring to produce inside these sheds might be better described as perverted honey. Or “phoney” for short.

Because the reason this method of honey farming is secret is that “phoney” is being fraudulently sold to us as honey when it is really just sweatshop syrup.

The only way to be reasonably sure that the honey you are consuming is not “phoney” is to purchase from a reputable local producer or buy cut natural honeycomb – so it’s still where the bees made it.

Neither option is cheap, but both will taste significantly better than cheaper golden syrup, which exactly like “phoney” delivers no beneficial pollination whatsoever.

Please join the campaign against phoney honey by clicking on the link below.

*A petition is circulating this National Honey Day requesting the UK Government to improve the labelling of the origin of the honey in our shops: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/624402

Click here to read more about the British Beekeeper’s Association’s campaign for people to buy local honey

Find out how to get started in beekeeping with Bill Anderson’s Idler Academy course

Read Bill Anderson’s beekeeping column in every issue of Idler magazine

Our September/October issue is available in bookshops as well as Waitrose, WHSmiths, Booth’s and Easons.