From the New York Times:

“There are no standards for USDA certified organic honey.

They do not exist. If that is the case, how can these companies

put the organic seal on their products? A logical question, right?

Given that there are no national standards for organic honey, the USDA’s National Organic Program has said the following: “Certifiers can certify honey but the USDA would not give any guidance in terms of criteria to be used. Each certifier must use its own criteria, whether it is based off of the EU standards or not.”

Read full article here….. http://livingmaxwell.com/organic-honey-certified

 

 

 

Here is our Italian Queen, who liked to drink vine, eat pizza and had many kids.  They, in turn, also disliked work but loved to “dance” on the surface of the hive by quickly moving back and forth. This funny behavior is called “washboarding” and is considered among beekeepers bees’ favorite “leisure activity”. Donna Regina flew away this spring with a handful of bees. We think, our neighbors got them.  They collected and hived a swarm. Good luck to them!

She was replaced by a local mom, who runs faster than her children and works 24/7.

You can watch bees dancing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbwumXVTOz8

 

 

Would an organic store take honey from a small beekeeper, which has a surplus of 40-50 pounds of honey?  Probably, not.  They need a continuous, large supply. Large supply comes from commercial beekeepers, whose “natural” ways might be the “organic standard” for some people.  Not for us. 

1)      Location. Commercial beekeepers use several locations for their hives. Many “rent” locations in exchange for honey and wax.  Some put their hives next to the farm fields, or next to Susquehanna; some take their hives to orchards and farm fields for pollination.  A lot of these farms, certainly, are not organic, they use pesticides and fertilizers, but the beekeeper rarely has a way of knowing.  Bees need water as much as they need pollen; they use it for ventilation, for wax making and drinking.  Susquehanna River, where bees will pick water off wet rocks and dirt together with all of the waste that washes ashore, is not a good source for them.  People’s pools are even worse. Bees need forest creeks, ponds, puddles and abundance of morning dew.

 

Our five hives are located in our backyard.  The farm fields around us haven’t been worked on since the 40s.  We have beautiful wild flower meadows and woods- ten miles all around.  Bees can fly 5 miles away, but they will not fly farther than they need to, and there is plenty of food for them right here!

 

Our first hive, which hosted Donna Regina.

 

2)      Honey.  Commercial beekeepers usually collect the harvest once or twice a year right after a major honey flow, which means- mixed honey. 

We take supers off as soon as they are ready, so we know what bloomed that month and what kind of a honey we got.  This is especially important for treating allergies.  I have them in May; my kids have them in September.  There is honey made during both of these months.

 

3)      Processing. Commercials beekeepers do have lots of honey.  An average hive in a good year makes a surplus of 50-100 pounds of honey; a commercial beekeeper in our area has 50-300 hives. That’s a lot of work when it comes to extraction.  The honey is capped on the frame and uncapping produces a lot of wax debris, which needs to be filtered out.  So, some commercial beekeepers take the honey frames out of the hives before bees cap it.  Then, beekeepers evaporate the water using dehumidifiers.  No harm done? I don’t know, but I prefer the bees do it with their tiny nifty wings.

If beekeepers pull out capped honey, all of them will use hot electrical knives (heated to approximately 200 degrees) to uncap the frames.  Hot knife unnecessarily heats the honey.  After the honey is spanned out of the frames, it is being heated up again to 120 degrees (which is considered safe for honey), to make it run faster.

 

 

We let our bees to cap the honey as a way of telling us- it is preserved! Then we uncap it with a scraper (looks a bit like a doggy hairbrush), spin it and let it slowly drain through a double sifter.

Takes two days, but our honey is truly raw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kids with a capped frame.

 

4)      Care. The biggest enemy of bees is  the Varroa mite, which attaches to the body of the bee and weakens the bee by sucking hemolymph.  In this process, RNA viruses such as the deformed wing virus spread to bees.  Commercial beekeepers do a twice a year treatment: formic acid vapor

(which is considered a “natural” remedy) and Apistan strips (chemical).

 

The truth is- bees don’t need any treatment at all, if the levels of mites are low.  We keep special under-hive boards, covered with olive oil, so we can count mites, knocked down by the bees.  If their numbers are rising, we shake our bees with powdered sugar to encourage grooming.  We also install special drone frames, because mites multiply on drone larva.  When bees cap the drone cells, we freeze the frames, killing all of the mites.

 

5)      Commercial beekeepers have no way of insulating so many hives, so a lot of their bees die during winter and are being replaced in the spring with southern bees and new queens.  These bees usually come back to our area from the “pollination trips”, which are not healthy for bees, because they get nutrition, limited to one or two types of plants.  Therefore the bees are given supplements and brood boosters to start them off in our area.

We built five little winter houses for our bees; we leave them enough honey  to last through the winter, so there is no need to feed them any supplements.  We don’t replace our queens unless it’s necessary; we let our bees to decide the destiny of their mother.  This way we keep bees with the best gene strands; they are strong and reliable, resistant to disease; they are born local and we keep them going from year to year.  The only maintenance we do is the imposition of “immigration reform” every spring: to prevent quickly multiplying bees from swarming and flying away, we split hives to provide them with new spacious housing!

 

The best honey comes from small apiaries, but even when you see it being sold at the farm market, don’t assume, the beekeeper respects natural practices.  Always ask: How many hives do you have and where are they located? How do you process your honey? How do you handle Varroa mite problem?

The chances are- you will be given an honest answer, because the “large apiary” practices, described above, are widely considered the “standard”: they are “safe and natural”, and are being taught during beekeeping classes.

 

 

 

As you can see, we know our bees face to face.

 

 

 

 

 

Bees are endangered species.

 “Once the bees have left the earth, man will have four years left on the planet.” This statement is a paraphrase of a quote Albert Einstein made in 1955. In many areas of the U.S. bee populations have declined by 50 percent or more. Experts have theorized that the huge die-off of bees worldwide since 2006, a major threat to crops that depend on the honey-making insects for pollination, is not due to any one single factor. Parasites, viral and bacterial infections, pesticides, and poor nutrition resulting from the impact of human activities on the environment have all played a role in the decline. The loss of bees has been dubbed “colony collapse disorder.”  Only this summer there were two new cases of “zombie bees” in CA, SD and Washington states, when beekeepers started to lose their hives due to a fly parasite, which paralyzes and kills honey bees. 

Many people don’t realize how valuable the honeybees really are.  They spray them out of the trees or from the cracks of their houses, mistakenly thinking that a bee removal will be costly.  There are a lot of beekeepers on the list of our Southern Tier Beekeeping Association, who would do bee removal for free, us including. But some people call us too late.  Just a few weeks ago, a storm split a large tree in half, exposing a huge honey bee nest.  The owner called us to remove the bees right before the tree loggers came to take the tree away.  The owner said he “enjoyed watching the bees fly in and out of the tree for 8 years”! 

 

We had to vacuum the bees under the rain, together with water, honey and the debris from the broken comb.  Even a short trip home was too much for these delicate creatures- all of them had died.  Six pounds of wild bees, resistant to diseases and pests, who survived on their own for 8 years, were dead because of lack of awareness.

  Some people do not want to see their “tree” or “roof” bees go to a beekeeper.  We will gladly teach anyone for free about hiving their wild bees and taking care of them in the responsible way, which is safe and beneficial to humans and insects.

Please, spread the word, learn about honey bees and teach others!

 

Goldenrod honey