honey content - legal requirement

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priono

House Bee
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while selling honey at a market last weekend i was asked pretty often by east Europeans and some i guess middle Easters how much sugar i added and fed to my bees. (they all agreed that they know all 'tricks'). Of course i don't do things like that except for winter. but a quick browse through some foreign shops revealed that all cheap honeys (1lb for 2.99) list sugar or nectar syrup as first ingredient, even in comb packages.

so my question is:
what is nectar syrup or sugar nectar or whatever they call it?
how do they get the sugar into the comb? (open feeding i guess)
what is the legal required percentage of honey to call it honey?
and third: how would you answer those questions which is in a way a justification for the rather expensive prices compared to the imported stuff.

Thanks.
 
while selling honey at a market last weekend i was asked pretty often by east Europeans and some i guess middle Easters how much sugar i added and fed to my bees. (they all agreed that they know all 'tricks'). Of course i don't do things like that except for winter. but a quick browse through some foreign shops revealed that all cheap honeys (1lb for 2.99) list sugar or nectar syrup as first ingredient, even in comb packages.

so my question is:
what is nectar syrup or sugar nectar or whatever they call it?
how do they get the sugar into the comb? (open feeding i guess)
what is the legal required percentage of honey to call it honey?
and third: how would you answer those questions which is in a way a justification for the rather expensive prices compared to the imported stuff.

Thanks.

The constitiuents of honey are
sugars (fructose, glucose, sucrose)
water
pollen
honeybee wax
nectar residues including plant phenols
anything the bees landed on or in
 
Sorry, but you don't have 'ingredients' for honey.

Derek's word "constituents" is more accurate.
And for "Honey" they do not need to be declared. "Honey" says it all.


There are legal penalties for "the tricks" of selling sugar syrup as "Honey". Have a read through the Honey Regulations and their Guidance Notes.
 
"sugar or nectar syrup as first ingredient"

that describes the main constituent of true honey.


honest answer is i don't feed sugar to my productive bee colonies during the foraging season.
 
from the 2003 regs otherwise it ain't 'oney

1.2. Sucrose content in general not more than 5 g/100 g

exceptions
a)not more than 10 g/100 g
false acacia (Robinia pseudoacacia), alfalfa (Medicago sativa), Menzies Banksia (Banksia menziesii), French honeysuckle (Hedysarum), red gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis), leatherwood (Eucryphia lucida, Eucryphia milliganii), Citrus spp.

b)not more than 15 g/100 g

lavender (Lavandula spp.), borage (Borago officinalis)
 
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The legislation: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2243/made
The official guidance notes: http://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/multimedia/pdfs/honeyguidance.pdf

English, but Scottish, Welsh and NI have analogous legislation.

If it's called "Honey", then it has to be the natural product, that is made by bees collecting nectar. Most of the forage in the UK provides the sugars glucose (particularly OSR) and fructose and small amounts of sucrose. White table sugar is all sucrose. If you feed bees sugar in winter bees move it around the hive and if as a lot is left in spring some will end up in the honey they store the next summer. Hence the maximum permitted levels, some sucrose is natural and a little may be left over from winter feeding but adding sugar syrup that you know will be in what you later sell as "honey" is an offence.

There's a legal way to avoid the problem. That is not to call it "Honey", it used to be quite common to see "Honey Spread" or similar on the label. That could be blended with sugar and is still legal in some countries. As far as I recall I think that's now considered too close in the UK although you could probably use "Spread blended with Honey". Honey as an ingredient for "Honey Cake" or whatever where more sucrose is added is unlikely to be a problem.

The illegal way is to use one of the ways of reducing the sucrose content of your feed. A partially inverted syrup like Ambrosia is lower in sucrose. Some of the earlier marketing suggested inverted syrup was hard to tell from honey, the purpose of the phrase was rather ambiguous and is not in the current leaflets. In the US High Fructose Corn syrup is widely used as a bee feed, and has been used fraudulently to "extend" honey. There have been efforts to detect some forms of fraud in the UK http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-24475094 although most of the recent publicity seems to be about faking manuka.

The official answer is that if you see "Honey" on the label and "blended from EU and non-EU sources" as the origin then it's the cheapest honey they could find on the world market. Could be from China or wherever labour is cheap and regulations lax, probably from sources where it was harvested early and artificially dried. Unofficially, if it's clear as water and has been heated and highly filtered (to remove pollen) then you have no realistic way of telling what it is or where it's from so it might as well be mostly corn syrup.
 
You could point out to these people that there is no need to feed sugar to your bees because they make it themselves..
 
if you see "Honey" on the label and "blended from EU and non-EU sources" as the origin ..

it can come from anywhere and contain anything. It being honey is only dependent of the paper trail being accurate in the beginning and not compromised in any of the various stages and middlemen.

If you see "Honey" on the label and "blended from EU sources" as the origin,
it has exactly the same level of veracity of being honey and from the EU as the beef in Tesco ready meals.

For all practical purposes there are ZERO checks on actual origin and composition.

If you want European honey go visit Goran.
 
are we saying you should only trust the contents if the bees live at the postcode on the label? :unionsmilie:
 
Sorry, but you don't have 'ingredients' for honey. 'Contents' are a different matter.

Unless it's on a label like this...:laughing-smiley-014
27060-54g0j6.jpg


picture source http://goo.gl/wXLK0W
 
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Ingredients are items used for making or preparing food. It is like saying the ingredients for a bag of sugar is sugar and sugar and, err, more sugar. Totally pointless and precisely meaningless.
 
'Ingredients' might not make logical sense, but that's the law for you.

According to the government, you must label with "a list of ingredients"...

https://www.gov.uk/food-labelling-and-packaging/food-labelling-what-you-must-show

The list of ingredients shall be headed or preceded by a suitable heading which consists of or includes the word ‘ingredients’. It shall include all the ingredients of the food, in descending order of weight, as recorded at the time of their use in the manufacture of the food.
Article 18(1)


but if there is only one "ingredient", just saying 'Honey' without the I word is enough.
 
'Ingredients' might not make logical sense, but that's the law for you.

According to the government, you must label with "a list of ingredients"...

https://www.gov.uk/food-labelling-and-packaging/food-labelling-what-you-must-show

The list of ingredients shall be headed or preceded by a suitable heading which consists of or includes the word ‘ingredients’. It shall include all the ingredients of the food, in descending order of weight, as recorded at the time of their use in the manufacture of the food.
Article 18(1)


but if there is only one "ingredient", just saying 'Honey' without the I word is enough.


You only need a list of ingredients if there are more than two. (Whatever they might be.) As explained on the page you linked.

If you use the "reserved word" Honey in describing your product that brings in lots of additional specific requirements, so that, for one example, having an excessively high water content on a product labelled as "Honey" is a legal offence. Water is merely an example. There are quantified limits for other parameters including electrical conductivity, diastase activity and (as pointed out above) sucrose content.
 
According to the government, you must label with "a list of-ingredients"...

Not so. From the net on the rules and regs

''a list of ingredients-(if there are more than 2)''

is the requirement. By that it implies there is no need for two ingredients (only) to be listed. As I insist, you cannot have one ingredient (unless it might be cooked).

Ever seen a lettuce on sale with an ingredient list? I haven't.



''
 
Of course you're right.
Did you get to the end of my post before you replied ?
 

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