Beekeeping the BzB way

Fuata nyuki ule asali! Follow the honey bee!

BzB Beekeepers’ Association

BzB is a beekeeping association with over 80 hives. Our honey has:.

• A known provenance. Every jar is traceable to its apiary. Not a ‘Blend of EU and non-EU honeys’. (Whatever that means)
• Purity. Nothing added. Did you know nearly all of the honey in UK supermarkets has been imported from the far east or central America. Sadly, too often adulterated with cheap corn syrup (see press report below).
• Diverse origins. BzB’s honeybees range freely, gathering nectar from a wide variety of flora, not limited to vast mono-cultured fields like rapeseed.
• Organic sources. BzB bees forage in woodland and organic smallholdings farmed without chemical pesticides, weedkillers or fertilisers.
• Not processed. BzB honey is not subjected to post-harvesting blending, heat-treatment and filtration.

Finally, the bees do a great job fertilising local smallholders’ crops as they go – an invaluable help to them.

BzB Harvesting and Marketing. BzB collects the honeycombs and separates the honey by manual centrifuge. It’s sold to local buyers.

BzB planting

BzB’s terrain

Our Beekeepers

How pure is your honey?

Jon Ungoed-Thomas, The Guardian, 09-11-2024

Nine in ten honey samples from UK retailers fail authenticity test. Call for industry reform as latest results support belief that products are being bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup

The honey industry faces new demands to overhaul its supply chain after more than 90% of sampled products bought from large British ­retailers failed pioneering authenticity tests. The UK branch of the Honey Authenticity Network sent 30 samples last month from Britain for a novel commercial test based on the DNA profiles of genuine honey. Five were from UK beekeepers and 25 from big retailers, including supermarkets. The tests found that 24 out of the 25 jars of honey from retailers were considered suspicious. All five samples from UK local beekeepers were considered to be genuine.

Honey importers in the UK and some experts challenge the reliability of such testing, but this is the latest batch of tests suggesting what may be widespread adulteration in the honey supply chain, with some products suspected of being bulked out with cheaper sugar syrup. The British Honey Importers and Packers Association (BHIPA) said a “weight of evidence” assessment must be used to safeguard the ­supply chain. It said the “vast majority” of UK-sold honey was of very high standard. An EU investigation published last year found 46% of imported sampled products were suspected to be fraudulent, including all 10 honey samples from the UK.

The EU is working on advanced testing techniques to detect honey fraud and has passed new legislation to provide improved labelling of country of origin on jars of honey. Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.”

How can beekeeping help climate change?

There is an immense pressure to increase farmland by felling forests, encroaching on wild spaces. The appetite of developed nations plays a major part in this. We consume great quantities of palm-oil, beef and corn. All of these need huge acreages of land. The developing nations that meet this demand have little incentive to husband the soil – when it’s exhausted it’s much quicker and cheaper to move on, cut down more forests for a quick timber payoff, plant crops anew and leave a barren dustbowl behind.

More demanding, but more sustainable, would be to increase the output of the farmland already claimed. Bees pollinate! That’s an indispensable part of the effort. And the nectar foraged from wild spaces helps us value those too.

All about bees