We can achieve 100% organic honey

How can we know if bees from organic beehives collect only nectar from flowers and honeydew trees in organic production? This is a question that many consumers of organic raw honey ask ourselves. The answer of an expert would be, this cannot be known 100 percent. So, would there currently be a major fraud in organic honey, royal jelly, pollen and wax?

If what you are looking for is a quality organic raw honey, look no further, we in Las Rozas de Madrid or in our online store, you will find the best organic raw honey and conventional Spain and Europe of a wide range of honeys: Heather honey, eucalyptus, cantueso, rosemary, thyme, lavender, and so on.

Find out more about organic products in our article: Organic Farming

Where to buy organic honey online?

With the settlement of the internet many beekeepers are opening their own web pages to sell their own honey, but this requires costs, labor and maintenance that many of them are not aware of. In the end, an online shop is even if it is run by the beekeeper himself, it is a small intermediary.

With the emergence of websites, the physical store makes less and less sense and anyone at home can set up a website without even needing to have stock. Everything can come from the same producers.

One of the online shops where you can buy organic honey is ours. Unlike other shops, we have visited all the beekeepers, their facilities, we have asked for their registration of organic products and we have stock in order to supply you with honey or other product as soon as possible.

What are the differences between organic honey and normal honey?
The great differences between the qualities of honeys are greatly appreciated when we compare quality raw honey with pasteurized honey and large surfaces. The difference here is overnight. A raw honey that with the passage of time becomes solid, is a honey with great aroma, flavor and beneficial properties. Pasteurized honey does not taste very good, it is a product that has had all its aroma and taste removed, it is like drinking a tasteless syrup.

Difference between conventional and organic raw honey

The differences between an organic raw honey and a conventional one, we are going to analyze it from three points of view: taste and aroma, quality and control.

From the point of view of taste and aroma, the differences between organic and conventional honey are non-existent. It has nothing to do with organic aroma or taste.

From the point of view of quality, if the two honeys are from serious beekeepers who do not handle them, the quality of an organic honey and a conventional honey would be the same.

From a control point of view, organic honey beats conventional honey. Organic honey is subject to much stricter controls by the state agency. The organic beehives are visited and inspected without prior warning and the batches of honey are analysed very well.

Photo 1: Multi-flower honey from Cádiz

Can honey be completely organic?

Much remains to be organized and known in the world of organic products, because raw honey and organic pollen would be a deception to the consumer. Swiss labelling organisations such as “Bio-Swiss” and “Demeter” have created a list of organic beekeeping requirements to be filled in by the beekeeper. With these requirements that are asked of organic beekeepers, the aim is that at least half of the fields and melliferous plants that are around their biohives are in organic production.

Therefore the effort that organic farmers make, in terms of the biodiversity of their fields, the protection of the environment and the restoration of fields and wilderness areas is essential for organic beekeeping.

According to organic beekeeper Francesco Tuccie, who has his bee hives in Fricktal, in a region in northern Switzerland and produces organic raw honey and answering the consumer magazine “Espresso” of the Swiss media “SRF”: “organic farmers are increasingly striving to achieve these goals, to get 100 percent organic raw honey.

Organic beekeepers give their bees only organic sugar as nectar-scarce food.

Another requirement that organic certification bodies ask beekeepers for the production of raw honey, is that the beehives must be made of natural materials, that they feed them when needed only with organic sugar and that the methods to protect them from the varroa mite are not with chemicals, ensuring a raw honey and beeswax free of chemicals.

According to Tucci, an ecological beekeeper should not have as first objective the search for economic benefits, his main objective should be to protect nature and save the bees from extinction.

The organic certification body regularly checks the beehives of organic beekeepers and also checks that the beekeeper fulfils his obligations. According to the honey company “Demeter”, they are even more demanding with their beekeepers whom they certify.

The penetrating smell of lavender flowers envelops the entire hive.

There is a wide variety of single-flower raw honeys, such as raw thyme, lavender and heather honey, but how can you guarantee the buyer that only one type of nectar is collected by bees?

When it comes time for a type of plant to bloom, such as when lavender blooms, all the bees will collect this type of nectar, which is the most abundant at this time. The beekeepers, being aware of this, separate the honey that is collected at this moment and once they extract it, they place it in different drums to separate it from the rest. Anyway, before selling it as raw monofloral honey, it must be analyzed. If it has a concentration greater than 60 percent of a type of pollen, it will be considered monofloral.

A raw honey 100 per 100 monofloral it is impossible to obtain it, because it will always have some pollen of other flowers, because the moment of flowering of the flowers coincides in most of the cases.

Why is the price higher than organic honey?

The bees are strongly threatened so they have to be treated continuously, otherwise they die. The bees cannot support themselves, throughout history we have been selecting bees to form large honeycombs and being the hive so large have very little chance of surviving by themselves.

This together with the varroa, a mite that weakens and transmits disease, makes all hives must be treated. In conventional beekeeping they use acaricides and antibiotics in the doses recommended by specialists. A beekeeper cannot use chemicals to his antójo, to them they prescribe the amount of antibiotics and other products that can throw to his bees.

In the case of organic beekeeping, they must use organic products to treat varroa and other diseases. Treatments that are less effective and more expensive, increasing bee mortality and the labor required. Another thing that organic honey has, is its bureaucracy, because it is controlled, a greater amount of paperwork is necessary. All this is what makes organic honey is of great quality, has greater control and its price is higher.

Source

El medio de comunicación alemán SRF “Bio-Honigbienen trinken nicht nur Bio-Naktar: Etikettenschwindel?”.  ( Las abejas de producción ecológica no sólo beben néctar ecológico, por lo tanto ¿sería esto un engaño? http://www.srf.ch/