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This is honey:
“Honey is a supersaturated solution of sugars, mainly fructose, glucose, and maltose-like sugars, with traces of sucrose, glucose oxidase, hydrogen peroxide, phenolics, flavonoids, terpenes, etc. (12). The sugars make honey hygroscopic (moisture absorbing) and viscous, and the sugar concentration plus other factors including low pH, hydrogen peroxide, and the flavonoids, phenolics and terpenes make honey antimicrobial or prevent microbial growth..”
Honey seems like such a good thing – one of those substances of life that can’t possibly have any downside. Sweet AND antimicrobial? What’s not to like? Well, we have a problem in this country with honey and that is the sheer amount of honey that is imported into this country. The two top exporters of honey in the world are Turkey and China – the place where most large commercial packagers in the US get their honey is from China.
And this is a huge problem.
Seattle P_I Investigates Honey Laundering
“Two-thirds of the honey Americans consume is imported and almost half of that, regardless of what’s on the label, comes from China, the Seattle P-I reported last month.
The newspaper’s five-month investigation into honey laundering — the intentional mislabeling of the country of origin — found that tons of Chinese honey coming into the U.S. is tainted with banned antibiotics.
But when the contamination is discovered by the industry through internal testing, insiders say, federal health or customs officials are almost never notified, and the honey ends up being dumped back on the market.”
…Testimony from federal investigators and informants offer a glimpse into a typical deal: Wolff (a German import/export house) sold Chinese honey to a U.S. honey producer. The packer tested the shipment and found traces of antibiotics. Wolff took the honey back and resold it to another packer who didn’t test for contaminants.
If convicted, the Wolff executives face up to five years in prison for conspiring to falsify country of origin on the Chinese shipments.
In its series, the P-I reported that it had received shipping papers showing that Chinese honey, falsely labeled as a product of India, was sold to several U.S. honey packers, including one of the nation’s largest — Sue Bee Honey Association.”
Excuse me – Sue Bee? We’re talking “Mom and Apple Pie” here – their ‘queen shaped’ jars are on every grocer’s shelves in America. Sue Bee is buying up Chinese honey – falsely labeled as to origin? Now, why would Chinese producers want people to think that their honey came from someplace else?
Let’s see now…how many news stories about tainted food (both animal and human) produced in China have come out in the past couple of years? How many stories about people who have gotten sick or died from consuming Chinese food products in the past couple of years? The most recent stories are about infant formula that has killed tens of Chinese babies and about processed spring rolls poisoning Japanese. The Chinese government is very concerned about their image here – but their answer is to execute factory executives and a government minister, not fix the problem.
So, what is Sue Bee doing about their problem?
“Bill Allibone, Sue Bee’s president, said the company has no intention of telling government regulators about the bad honey it finds. It’s not really Sue Bee’s honey, he said, "because technically, it’s still (the importer’s) property until we pay for it. "We have not notified the FDA in the past because we don’t have title to that property," Allibone said.”
Yep, that’s right up there with “This won’t hurt a bit” and “The check is in the mail”. Sue Bee does not care enough about what happens to the customers who eat their honey – or the other members of their cooperative that supply them, either, since now THEY and their reputations are tainted with this. Will US beekeepers who are in the Sue Bee Association (it’s a coop, like DairyLea) be able to see their honey to anyone else?
But, I mean, it’s just a spoonful of honey, right? No one can really be hurt by just a spoonful of honey (of course, the same could be said of a piece of sushi but if you are like Jeremy Piven and eat it daily, sometimes more than once, the exposure can get really bad)?
“John Fratti, a former pharmacy representative from Hummelstown, Pa., also has severe sensitivity to the drugs Chinese beekeepers were using.
"Allowing even the slightest chance that these antibiotics and other drugs can end up in honey on our store shelves is criminal," Fratti said. "You can’t begin to imagine the pain and harm that can come to us sensitive to those drugs."
So, is anyone out there protecting consumers from adulterated honey?
No. Not the USDA. Not the National Honey Board. The packers like Sue Bee now refuse to pay or take title to shipments of honey before they test. If it’s contaminated, they just send it back to the importer – ‘not our problem’ – and the importer just finds another packer who does not test..or whose testing is not very good.
And what if the one part of the shipment that is sampled by a packer like Sue Bee is not contaminated, or not contaminated enough to show up on tests? Then a packer buys the shipment and puts it in with the rest and it all gets mixed in with the local honey the packer buys and then put into those packages on your store shelves, to be bought and used by consumers.
Another thing to think about though is that honey is not just used for food. We raise bees and once sold a five gallon pail of our honey to a local soap and cosmetics manufacturer. Honey is actually a great ingredient for that sort of use because it is hygroscopic – it’s a great natural moisturizer. But if we are selling to someone like that, so are the importers – and it would not surprise me if an importer, faced with a refused shipment of contaminated honey, would offload that on a manufacturer who was not producing something that people put in their mouths..but would put on their bodies. And we all know that contaminants can enter the body through the skin.
Not good.
So, as a consumer and a honey producer, here is what I would suggest:
1) Find a local beekeeper or local beekeepers.
2) Ask them what they feed their bees? Are they supplementing and what are they using? Sugar water? High fructose corn syrup? Corn syrup and water? Pollen cakes – from where? Soy cakes – from where?
3) Do they take their bees on trucks to other states? That stresses the bees – not good for health.
4) Buy local and from a clean source – we use sugar water and don’t feed protein supplements. We grow extra things like buckwheat to keep the bees going during ‘flower dry spells’ in the summer.
It always pay to think about not only where your food comes from, but also where the inputs to that food came from.
See also:
Where Have All The Bees Gone? More Information on Colony Collapse
70 Comments
Digg is open, folks.
It would be useful for the packer that tested for antibiotics and the one that did not be named, as long as it is documented, to avoid defamation lawsuits.
National baking companies tried for a labeling change to use the wording
“honey water” which would have allowed them to evade country of origin issues.
Exactly – and baked goods are one of the primary commercial uses of honey in this country, because it is hygroscopic – it helps keep baked goods from getting stale. But the primary problem is that we have a bunch of people who refuse to take responsibilty, so this junk is getting into the food supply.
Dugg.
Great post, Toby. Thanks.
Thanks so much.
From the Seattle P-I Article w/regard to the FDA’s role in this:
“It is in the interest of the honey industry to assure that adulterated honey doesn’t get into the marketplace to compete with the legitimate products made by honest producers,” said Martin Stutsman, who heads most of FDA’s efforts at policing adulterated food.
“We encourage industry, upon discovering that a food is adulterated, to let the local FDA office know about the particulars,” he said. “That benefits the honest industry generally and also helps FDA in its enforcement activities to protect the public.”
So, the FDA is not inspecting this stuff themselves and they expect the commercial honey packers to report it – only they take the position that they won’t. Which means that it never gets reported and nothing gets done about it.
My honey is safe, but then I generally know where he is at all times. Oh, wait…
Seriously: Thanks!
Well, PW – it’s always a good policy to know where your honey is at all times… :)
In response to Jane’s email asking what was important to me to have FDL focus on in 2009, high on the list was an FDA with sharp teeth. I want to see America’s food supply safe. I personally don’t eat all that much honey and most of what I do eat is bought from the organic farmers I buy my vegetables from. I’ll ask them what their bees are eating. Thanks for the list of questions to ask.
The problems with food safety and inspection people at FDA are across the board. No matter what item ordinarily is being inspected, the number of inspectors and therefore inspections has been cut drastically – meat, poultry, fish, everything. And in this case, they are expecting the Honey Board to deal with the issues – and no one will touch it. This is very bad – because they are only talking about antibiotics – knowing the other chemical contaminents that have been found in processed foods from China, who knows what else is in that honey? The other thing is their labeling it as originating in other countries to hide the fact that it is really from China.
Another great post, thank you, Toby, and recommended. My family had a small bee hive when I was growing up, and I’ve considered a small one for my backyard, but I really hate being stung by bees and so have kinda put the idea on the backburner. I remember Dad going out there in his protective gear and smoking them out of the hive to harvest the honey, but even so he usually managed to get stung at least once or twice in the process. I have a lot of bees in my garden in summer because of all the flowers and veggis, so it seemed like a good idea at the time. I leave them alone, and they are no problem at all, but I become a big chicken when I think about smoking them out of their hive and ticking them off.
the DH has been keeping bees for years and he always gets stung. Part of the game, I’m afraid.
Thanks Toby. Have a local honey person at the farmers market – but have not always been scrupulous about sources. Now know the questions to ask.
Labeling issues are so out of hand. Don’t care so much who the food distributer is. Need to know who and where the producer is.
SN — the thing is — EVERYONE feeds. You feed to get a nuc (a starter hive; four frames of bees and a queen)started. Beekeepers who have a hive with nosema, will feed to give them their meds – or if they ’go commando’ will burn the hive and kill all the bees to prevent the spread. It’s a question of what you feed and when you feed(to feed for nosema, that is in the fall, after the honey harvest and before the winter and the antibiotics will be gone by the time the beekeeper goes to get the honey in the next summer theoretically). We only feed sugar in water. Feeding stuff like soy is a real problem(see my other diary on bees) and the pollen cakes ..if they come from China..are probably laced with things like melamine to fool the testing on protein, so its best for beekeepers to use natural forage sources.
Does Honey cause tooth decay? Or perhaps less ToothDecay than other foods?
TCU – OK…anything that has sugars in it and is sticky, whether it is molasses, honey, corn syrup, etc. is going to promote tooth decay. Honey, on its own is antimicrobial, in that it doesn’t promote the growth of microbes in it. That being said, of course there is the problem of botulism spores that can be found in non-pasturized honey which can, if injested, start to grow and mutiply inside the stomachs of little children which is why using honey in home made infant formulas is basically a no-no.
I hope the FDA investigates this!
Amazing post, thank you Toby.
America is broken.
Two problems here:
1) As is said above in comment #7 — the FDA does not see themselves as having a role in this; they expect the Honey Board to deal with it.
2) Even if they did, the number of FDA food inspectors for all types of food inspection: eggs, meat, poultry, processed food and so on, has been vastly reduced over the past 8 years. You can’t do inspections adequately with the numbers of trained inspectors we have on the ground now. We should have literally thousands more.
Ah but has anyone studied if Honey produces less tooth decay than sugar?
Upton Sinclair, where are you now?
TCU – I’m sure someone has; I’ll see if I can find any studies for you.
https://www.dentist.net/sugars-article.asp
“Honey is just as likely to cause tooth decay and weight gain as any other sugar.”
The FDA now has a new boss who can change how the FDA sees. Next we should have more FDA inspectors regardless Cat food and peanut butter alone demand it.
Honey is food the Food and Drug guys should watch it even if it is imported.
Dang!
Here he is.
I absolutely agree – any food stuff, whether processed or in it’s unrefined state, should be tested and the levels of acceptance should be lowered for certain things – antibiotics, melamine, hormone precursors, other chemicals. This is just not acceptable. And also, US packers and manufacturers should be encouraged to contact FDA immediately upon finding anything in testing and handing this stuff over so that it doesn’t get into the food supply in some other way.
Well, at least we’ve located ONE person who had something to say about food contamination. I’d like to find some more who are perhaps a little more energetic, however. :)
Why would you add something to honey? It’s one of the most perfect foods just as-is. Antibiotics? Why?
Having more inspectors and more licensed facilities would help everyone – even small producers and small farmers. I know our small meat producers would love not having to go to Pennsylvania in order to find a USDA and FDA licensed slaughter house.
And no one should be allowed to “return to sender” foodstuffs that don’t meet our standards. That crap should be destroyed at the shipper/dealers’ expense. Just that much more of an incentive to meet our standards, if you can’t remarket the stuff elsewhere on the planet with more lax standards.
Unfortunately, his current oversight ability is roughly equivalent to that of the FDA.
One thing not mentioned in the article is that antibiotics aren’t the only things in honey put there by man. One of the biggest health problems of bees, besides the recent problem with colony death, is mites. There are two kinds and they are controlled by using acaricides that are toxic for them, but not so much for insects (mites are related to ticks, not insects). These acaricides, amitraz is one of the more common, can be toxic to mammals in high doses, not what you would get eating honey, but even low doses aren’t doing you any good.
To solve the problems we are now having with pollination, or lack thereof, we need to change the whole scheme of business. It would require encouraging other pollinators such as wild bees, which are also in decline, probably from insecticides but maybe from diseases and parasites they acquired from domestic bees. It would require keeping bees in one location and providing a multitude of flower sources during the year. It would require more integrated insect control programs to reduce or eliminate the insecticides being broadcast into the environment. It would include a better control of introduced bees since the varoa mite and the recent Israeli virus that came from Australia and may be responsible for the colony collapse syndrome are both introductions from elsewhere. It would require serious research into developing strains of bees resistant to the multitude of bacterial and parasitic problems that our domestic Italian honeybee suffers from.
There is a lot of concern about bee colony die off (see my other bee diary, linked above) – there are several bacterial diseases that bees can get if they are stressed, being pushed to produce through trucking to other crops and so on. Commercial beekeepers will give antibiotics to try to keep the bees going. The proper way to do this is to harvest the honey, then late in the fall, give the medications mixed with powdered sugar within the hive. by the time winter hits, the meds have been taken, you can clean the rest up and close the bees up for the winter. By the spring, theoretically, the antibiotics are gone, the bees will clean out the hive in the spring, and by the time the beekeeper goes to get the honey again, the antibiotics are gone…but it all depends on whether or not the beekeepers are careful, giving the right dose, at the right time, not taking honey early in the season and so on and so forth. We go commando at our house.
China might have colony collapse disorder too?
Hi, All :)
Completely OT ;) but
(I don’t if this has already been noted?)
I know there is a lot going on in this country that needs to be fixed, but this is important too.
They need FIX this monument and the money should be made available ASAP.
‘The battle over the fate of the Tomb of the Unknowns is heating up as a decision by the Army approaches about what to do with America’s most sacred monument.
The Army says it will make its call in February on whether to repair Arlington National Cemetery’s iconic tomb, which has sprouted cracks and other evidence of deterioration, or replace it with a replica.’
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/40527
There is a non-miticide method of controlling mites by using special frames in the bee hives to encourage the workers to create drones just in those areas – mites tend to like drones better. On a regular basis, the beekeeper pulls those frames, puts them in a household freezer to kill the mites and the drones and puts the frames back. The workers then clean out the frames and the whole process starts again. If this is done every couple of weeks, you can keep bee hives basically with a very low mite load on the rest of the bees and not use any chemicals at all.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is going out of business. They have been a powerful investigative reporting voice in many venues. Soon to be silenced.
TCU — China and Turkey are number 1 in terms of commercial exports of honey. To do this requires huge bee yards, lots of trucking. This sort of concentrated raising and movement is very stressful for bees and exposes them to all sorts of diseases and problems, including colony collapse.
Thanks so much. I had no idea that bees needed meds. Knew that we were having problems with bees not being around much now but this is really scary for people with allergies.
I know – this is really horrible. They have basically been doing a tremendous job in terms of investigative journalism. I’m only hoping that the reporters that have done this great work will find homes at other venues.
We used to have a couple hives in the back next to the vegetable garden. The only time I or my son ever got stung was when we were in the garden on a sunny day (The garden was in the flight path into the hives, so we were in their way). On cool days or overcast, it never happened. On occasion we would take the lid off the hive to see how the bees were doing, no protection, no smoke, and we never got stung then. We did smoke when we stole their honey, but given our technique, I don’t think it really prevented anything, but we didn’t get stung.
ON topic now :) (sorry Toby :( )
I know in the UK they are very concerned about the Honey Bees. They are having good results in just getting back the old way of doing things, so it shows that the problems are solvable.
We have a farmer’s market in Gulfport every Tuesday. Local beekeeper sells his honey there. It’s named after the season. He provides samples and you can taste the difference between them.
Small bee keepers can produce their honey without them. We have never needed it. But you have to watch your hives and if you get a problem you have to make the decision to medicate – and destroy the honey so that you are not possibly giving anything to a customer..or destroying the hive. Every state has bee inspectors who do spot checks and will contact you. People who just have bee yards around that they visit(like at orchards) usually do not have too many problems. People who are big commercial producers, who are loading thousands of beehives on flatbeds and trucking them down to Florida etc. are stressing the bees terribly. They are the ones that have most of the problems. But as consumers, if we want to avoid any chance, you buy local, from someone you know and who will tell you what they are doing – feeding, with what and when and if they are medicating.
I like that ethos.
Thanks for this informative article, Toby! Sure shows another strong reason to be a locavore.
Sickening indeed to think of Laura Bush wanting organic foods served for her and George in the White House while he merrily went along tearing down every possible safeguard for the general food supply.
If you are good and clever and can catch ‘the flow’ when the different plants are out, then you can have a different kind of honey depending on what is in bloom at the time. Early season will be the various fruit flower honeys, then you get regular flowers, wild flowers. Up here in Upstate NY, we will get a really dark, strong honey from that Japanese knotweed that grows by the side of the road or from buckwheat. And if the weather holds, later, in October, we can get just goldenrod.
newt – one of the things the DH and I used to do when we had more hives was always keep a big garden bed (about 50′x 4′) empty so that we could put in buckwheat for the bees if the summer looked like it was going to be dry and play out. Buckwheat comes into flower in a couple of weeks and we could keep the bees fed and going rather than feeding them sugar water if the fields around us dried up. Sometimes you have to treat the bees like livestock and make sure they get water and food. :)
Yes – in general, as long as you don’t mess with them a lot or try to bend them to what you want to do (like trucking them big distances), bees will be less stressed and have fewer health issues. It’s better for everyone.
Do you know of a place to order safe honey? I can’t imagine there are any local keepers where I live. Thanks.
Did she really? Wow..that’s a piece of hypocrisy, isn’t it?
Where do you live?
California – Bay Area
Do you have a natural foods store (not Whole Foods) near you? I’ve got 2 close by and they sell local honey.
Two sources of information on who is keeping bees in your area:
1) search on the internet for your state’s bee keeping association
2) call your local cooperative extension
3) look in your phone book for exterminators – many times they have beekeepers ‘on contact’ because they will get calls from homeowners who have discovered swarms in the spring. They will call a beekeeper to come get it rather than try to exterminate it themselves.
Will look. We have lots of those. thanks
You must have farmers markets in that area; you will need to find out who manages them and is in charge of the vendors and call and find out which ones have beekeepers selling honey.
Thanks. This has been so interesting and helpful.
:) We aim to please!!
I’m sure it was just a way to keep W out of the “special cookies” Lynne Cheney brought down from the Naval Observatory kitchen….
How would he ever know? The place was invisible, right?
Is there absolutely nothing in this country that hasn’t been corrupted/corporatized? Fer the love of god, even honey???
“My honey is safe, but then I generally know where he is at all times. Oh, wait…”
Oh wait indeed! “at all times” yeah, but that “generally” hedge worries me. :-)
New Post—->
mmmm, no. (and this has been another episode of short answers to complex questions)
The thing is, once you get into a large packer/producer situation, there is always a much greater chance for problems. Dairy farmers used to sell direct. When I was little, there were several farmers in our area who had their own dairies and dairy stores and sold milk, cheese, cottage cheese, cream and ice cream direct to consumers. Then Dairylea came in. Now, some of the members have broken away because they feel they have more control of the final product if they sell direct. It’s the same with the honey – Sue Bee is a cooperative – but they are now so big that they don’t have enough members to provide all the honey they need – so they are importing this stuff – which is contaminated from China. The thing that is really bad is that they obviously do not care about the safety of the product or what it might do to their customers.
OK – folks, thanks a lot – see you on the flip side.
Corporations are profit-making enterprises. If we want them to do something that doesn’t contribute to their bottom line, then we’ll have to legally require it.
For example, we could pass a law that says that if a company discovers that an imported food product is adulterated or doesn’t meet health standards, it must report this to the feds, even if it never takes possession. Since this isn’t the law today, they won’t do it.
Sorry I missed this one. David was a beekeeper for many years — first with the University of Minnesota and then on his own. Loved my honey! *g*