Natural honey is not organic honey?

Please do not associate pure natural honey to be free from pesticide and chemicals. Natural honey means no addition of water, flavoring or chemicals to the honey, but it does not mean that the bees are not treated with antibiotics or the foraging area is not sprayed with pesticides. If you eat conventionally produced honey, you are allowing yourself to ingest antibiotics, environmental pollutant and chemicals into your body.

How did all these nasty compound gets into honey?

To provide a better understanding as to why honey is exposed to chemicals, we will need to go through each step of the honey production process and you will understand how during each step, nasty chemical gets into our honey thru non-organic bee farming and production.

To put it simply, honey is produced by worker bees flying between the beehives and flowers, collecting nectar from the flowers and returning back to the hive and turning them into honey. Bees like humans, do fall sick at times. And when bee falls sick, they get spread easily since each colony of bees is made up by thousands of bees! Since the production of honey is totally dependent on the bees, it is essential to ensure that the bees are treated with antibiotics when they are sick, similar to humans. Sulfa compounds and antibiotics are the usual chemicals non-organic farmers use to treat bee diseases.

Now let look at the foraging area of the bees. After the health of the bee colony is maintained, the non-organic farmers need to ensure that the bees do have flowers to collect nectar from. For there to be flowers, the plant must be healthy and well-nutritioned so that they are able to flower. To achieve this, synthetic fertilizers can be added to the soil. In addition, plants can be spread with pesticides to prevent other insects from damaging the flower bud before the blossom period.

After collection of the honeycomb from the hives, the farmers need to extract honey from the honeycomb. Extracting honey from honeycomb is not a simple process. Depending on the nectar source, honey can crystallised in the comb making the extraction process difficult, there are other 'stuff' in the honeycomb including body parts of bees, propolis, pollen etc etc (You get all this 'stuff' in 100% unfiltered raw honey - must raw honey in the market are actually filtered. Imagine seeing dead bee in your jar of honey!!) To make the extraction easier, heat and carbolic acid could be used to ease up the process.

Maintain bee colonies are not easy process. Before the flowering period, beekeepers ensure that there are lots of worker bees to produce honey. After the harvest season is over, it is hard to maintain such a large population of bees. Since honey is a source of food for bees, beekeepers has to ensure that there is sufficient food reserve for the honey. Some beekeepers choose to exterminate the bees at the end of the season to reduce cost and maintenance- a common practice in the industry.

What makes organic honey so special?

Organic honey is the only guarantee that honey is free from any residue of chemicals, antibiotics and pollutants. Organic honey is a produced under very stringent organic guidelines. This guideline covers areas such as the source of the nectar, the foraging areas, bee management, extraction process, extraction temperature, packaging materials, packaging plant and machinery and transportation. Honey that is termed organic is required to be tested free from antibiotics, pesticides and pollutants. Producers, manufacturers and processors of organic honey have to keep fully detailed records ensuring the traceability of honey from the location of the hive to your table. This is to ensure that the organic honey that you get eating is 100% safe for consumption.

Organic honey is not only safe for us to consume, it is also healthy for the mother earth. Organic beekeepers ensure that the life cycle of bees are normal (bees are not exterminated after harvest season) and the foraging areas are free from human activity (no GMOs, no chemical on soil, no pesticide on plants). By supporting organic honey, we are doing our bit to protect our planet.