How can there be such a thing as "organic honey"?

Question

My girlfriend came back from the health store today with a jar of "organic" honey. How can honey truely be organic if Bee's fly everywhere it is impossible to know whether or not they have picked up contaminants such as pesticides from flowers or pollution from traffic fumes etc...etc...surely?

Answer 1

an organic bee farm.. they don't use honey from wild bees.

Answer 2

The term "organic" refers to the production and processing methods employed. In the strict interpretation, there is no such thing as "organic" as everything, soils, air and water have all been contaminated with man's chemical presence. By the same token there is no food is not "organically grown" (it grew from soil, or more correctly "it grew").
Bees, are keep, as any livestock. They are cared for, their needs addressed, and their product sold. Bees, like all livestock, from time to time have diseases that need to be dealt with. In "non-organic" production of honey certain chemical pesticides and herbicides are employed both in the hive and on the owned ground on which the bees forage. Under the rules of "organic production" such chemicals are prohibited, both in the hive and in the owned forage area.

It all comes down to what the certifying agency will allow and how they enforce the rules. There should be a label on your honey specifying would certified. Look them up and ask what certified means under their rules.

Eat healthy and enjoy!

Answer 3

it's also something to do with how far the bees fly from the hive - some farmers now have organic flowers for bees to feed on

also back in the UK a few years back the honey industry had a huge scare where they found bees had been feeding on a test field of genetically modified flowers and so GM honey got in to the foodchain - something which nearly brought the honey industry to its knees

Answer 4

NO
think,,!! if the bee finds the nectar ? foul she will pass it up.
then remember it is stored in a special gland and later deposited in a cell to ferment into honey.
It would have to be an illegal pesticide because most all now decompose quick.
BUT it is insane to spend the money for honey that 'sorry" IS just Plain organic to begin with..
why do you fear the pollution that a bee may face when you breath even worse in your house.

Answer 5

In Low Furness it means what it says. The beekeepers take their hives on to the moors and fells in Summer and the bees gather in nectar off wild heather and blueberry blossom. The smell is mind blowing and the taste out of this world.They are also taken to the untouched orchards when in Spring blossom.
Commercial honey is produced by feeding the bees a sugar solution, and it shows.

Answer 6

Well, basically it's organic if it's really honey. Unfotunately, most of the stuff we buy in the grocery stores labeled as honey is actually honey syrup, meaning that additional sugars and preservatives have been added to it. If your girlfriend came home with organic honey, it probably means its just the stuff the bees make.

Answer 7

Bees have a foraging range of 13.5km away from their hive, if there's no farms or cultivated land which uses non-organic methods in that perimeter, then you can be sure that any pollen, obtained by those bees, came from organic flowers.

Answer 8

The only thing I can think of is if you have a beekeeper with a farm that's more like a greenhouse, so the bees can't go anywhere he/she doesn't want them to go and will only get their "food" from sources he/she provides. But I would think such a set-up would be cost-prohibitive -- they'd have to charge $10.00 for a 4 ounce jar of honey...

Answer 9

Living in the country I have no sprays around me and I have a lot of bees gathering pollen from the wild flowers and I believe that their honey is as oraganic as that found in the pyrimids in Egypt

Answer 10

That's not the point. Organic is as natural as possible. Her honey probably doesn't have anything added or taken out of it. It's just honey.

Answer 11

Non-organic beekeepers routinely use sulfa compounds and antibiotics to control bee diseases, carbolic acid to remove honey from the hive and calcium cyanide to kill colonies before extracting the honey and of course conventional honeybees gather nectar from plants that have been sprayed with pesticides. The Lancet, a prestigious international medical journal, reported in 1993 that conventionally produced honey may contain residues of these chemicals and should be used with caution which is one of the reasons many of us jump for joy when we find a reliable source of certified organic honey.

Organic honey not only is safe to eat, but also helps keep our planet healthy. Organic beekeepers sustain the natural life cycle of bees by safeguarding their natural habitat, and nourishing them as nature intended. And because certifying a hive as organic is costly, they don't exterminate the bees at the end of the season—a common practice in conventional beekeeping.

And I agree it seems difficult to control where the bees go to collect pollen