Junk Food for Bees?
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Here's an interesting article that ran in today's New York Times. It seems that the beekeepers in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn were noticing that their bees were producing freaky candy-red honey. Was the local maraschino cherry factory to blame?
While this may seem silly, it does point to a deeper issue of beekeeping. Many, many beekeepers harvest every drop of their bees' honey. They then replace the bees' food with high-fructose corn syrup or other foods based on sugar, which in turn is stored in the honey combs. So, the honey you're buying at the supermarket may not be honey after all.
Years ago, honey was sold in its wax comb, so that consumers could see that the vendor wasn't selling a false product. Nowadays, even an "all natural" presentation won't tell a shopper if the honey was made from the nectar of flowers, or from a vat of corn syrup.
It's a crazy world we live in. We humans sure are good at making a mess of things.
Here's an interesting article that ran in today's New York Times. It seems that the beekeepers in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn were noticing that their bees were producing freaky candy-red honey. Was the local maraschino cherry factory to blame?
While this may seem silly, it does point to a deeper issue of beekeeping. Many, many beekeepers harvest every drop of their bees' honey. They then replace the bees' food with high-fructose corn syrup or other foods based on sugar, which in turn is stored in the honey combs. So, the honey you're buying at the supermarket may not be honey after all.
Years ago, honey was sold in its wax comb, so that consumers could see that the vendor wasn't selling a false product. Nowadays, even an "all natural" presentation won't tell a shopper if the honey was made from the nectar of flowers, or from a vat of corn syrup.
It's a crazy world we live in. We humans sure are good at making a mess of things.
Comments
I buy our honey in big quart jars from the Farmer's Market, where they tell me (and the color of the honey tells me) what the bees have been eating. But it never occurred to me that they might be feasting on HFCS.
I feel fairly confident about our local farmers being like-minded about our food sources, but I'll be asking about corn syrup next time.
We were just in Brooklyn for the holidays- didnt see any bees, though.
Annalisa