Honey is sweet, healthy, nearly immortal - & endangered

SO SWEET, yet so complicated. That's honey.

It's one of the oldest food products in all of civilization: Scholars have reported finding images of honey-hunting and beekeeping in rock paintings in Spain, India and Africa from the Mesolithic era (10,000 to 8,000 B.C.) and in 4,000-year-old beeswax paintings by Australian aborigines.

Honey is great right from the jar - and it never goes bad. It's a delicious ingredient in food. It's healthy; besides fructose, glucose and water, it contains small amounts of enzymes, minerals, vitamins and amino acids. It's even enjoying a renaissance among imbibers as mead (honey wine), and as an ingredient in beer and bourbon.

"I think it's become more popular [to produce and buy local honey] in, maybe, the last 10 years or so with the growth of farmers' markets and small farms," said Sean Weinberg, chef at Restaurant Alba, in Malvern.

"It's always our top seller in the gift shop," said Melanie Snyder, director of education and public programming at Bartram's Garden, in Southwest Philadelphia. The renowned botanical garden, which gets about 30,000 visitors a year, hosts eight hives.

Along with the Wyck Historic House and Garden and the Wagner Free Institute of Science, Bartram's Garden will host a three-day Honeyfest from Sept. 10-12, sponsored by the Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild. The event will mark the 200th birthday of native son Lorenzo L. Langstroth, considered the father of modern beekeeping for his invention of the removable-frame beehive.

Before that, beekeepers and honey lovers across America will mark Aug. 21 as National Honey Bee Awareness Day, and Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences will pay tribute to bees on Saturday and Sunday at its Bug Fest.

Bartram's honey is considered a wildflower variety, with nectar drawn from the predominantly native species on the site's 45 acres, but the sweet stuff ranges in colors, flavors and textures as diverse as the nectar sources (blossoms) that bees visit.

More than 300 distinct kinds of honey are produced in the United States, from common types, such as clover or orange blossom (the latter of which is often found in jars generically labeled "Honey"), to exotics such as eucalyptus. The lightest in color are mild-tasting, while darker honeys are more robust.

Noah Gress, a beekeeper from Media, said that much of the honey being retrieved from hives now is lighter, a reflection of its source - trees and flowers in the "early spring flow." As bees find a greater diversity of nectar sources later in the season, the honey gets darker, he said. Beekeepers leave much of that in hives for bees to consume during the winter.

Light or dark, foodies love honey, and the closer to the source, the better.

"Raw, pure honey" has a richer taste, said John Brandt-Lee, chef at Avalon Restaurant, in West Chester. "The mass-produced honey doesn't have all the pollens [and textures]. . . . In the fall, you have this beautiful dark, dark honey that has this really robust flavor."

Added Dean Browne, a brewer at Philadelphia Brewing Co. who makes mead on the side: "There are many, many different kinds of honey, and they all have a different impact on the alcohol content, the body and the aroma of the final [brewed] product."

Despite honey's popularity - Americans consumed 382 million pounds in 2009, about 1.1 pound per person - things are not all sweet. A group of producers and packagers crafted a public relations strategy, "True Source Honey," earlier this year to warn against impure and/or tainted honey, much of which comes from abroad. Meanwhile, the National Honey Board's "Save the Endangered Honey Bear" campaign centers on the idea that a container of honey should hold one ingredient.

Concern about so-called "dishonest" honey is directed largely at China, which, among other things, has been accused of shipping honey tainted with the powerful antibiotic chloramphenicol, which is banned in food products here. Trace amounts of the antibiotic, used to treat infected hives, have shown up in imports, including 64 large drums worth about $32,000 seized in June at the Delaware Avenue Distribution Center by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as part of an "ongoing and open investigation."

The Chinese also are accused of avoiding higher U.S. tariffs by shipping honey to other countries and relabeling it.

"China is acting almost like [organized crime] when it comes to honey imports," Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in June. He wants more crackdowns on illegal honey and is working to establish federal purity standards for honey, similar to those in Florida.

Right now, the only regulation is that the country or countries of origin be listed on the container.

Industry watchers say that some unscrupulous packagers "cut" honey with sugar water and other sweeteners. The whole process even has a nickname - honey laundering.

Some experts suggest that honey's purity problems have arisen in part because less is being produced in the United States, even as demand and prices have risen. According to the Department of Agriculture, production dropped 12 percent nationwide from 2008 to 2009. (Pennsylvania production dropped 24 percent, while New Jersey's fell 20 percent; Delaware's production was too low to be included in U.S. data.) The U.S. produced only about 38 percent of the honey consumed here last year, or about 144 million pounds.

No single reason is cited for the drop in U.S. production, but one of them is colony collapse disorder, a mysterious condition that has resulted in the loss of millions of bees, though Gress said that that affects mostly large-scale operations.

Federal officials last spring reported that the harsh winter and pesticide use harmed bee populations.

"The bees themselves have a lot of pests, and that's what can cause a lot of bees to die," Gress said.

"Ironically, bees in the city are much more protected from those things that are causing colony collapse disorder [and other bee-health problems]," said Nicole Juday, horticulturist at the Wyck House and a novice beekeeper at her Germantown home. She is one of the 50 or so apiarists in the Beekeepers Guild who have hives all over the city.

Some bee-health problems are thought to be caused by the bees having to pollinate hundreds of acres of the same crop - rather than a diverse group of plants - as well as the stress of being transported all over the country for their work.

"A lot of beekeepers try to be mindful of where their bees are," Gress said. "I try to keep mine out of heavy agricultural areas [where there is increased chemical use]."

"In urban areas," Juday said, "there is a surprising amount of open spaces. . . . Even weedy lots have a lot of plants that bees can use."

Having a bee-friendly garden is among the best things non-beekeepers can do to help their honey-producing neighbors (both human and insect). This time of year, especially, it's important for people's yards to have plants that help bees through what Gress called a "nectar dearth."

Bees will produce honey as long as they have a place to store it and as long as they have nectar sources, said Suzanne Matlock, of the Beekeepers Guild. Bees store the honey in their hives and seal it with wax when they are satisfied with its quality.

When the honeycombs and frames are filled, "we 'steal' the excess, and we leave the rest for them [for the winter]," Matlock said.

Using centrifugal force, beekeepers extract honey from the frames with hand-cranked or mechanical devices. Once the wax seal is broken, the honey flows from the combs into a barrel, then out of a spigot, through a series of increasingly finer screens, and into then jars.

"Each frame holds about three to four pounds of honey; there are about about three to four jars of honey in each frame," Matlock said, noting that a typical box holds about 40 pounds of honey.

Some in the industry disagree about how much uniform honey standards, as proposed by Schumer, will help. Jim Bobb, a Montgomery County apiarist, said that large producers such as Dutch Gold, of Lancaster, and Sue Bee, of Sioux City, Iowa, account for the overwhelming majority of mass-produced honey, such as what you find in supermarkets and in products such as honey graham crackers. Such companies are pushing hard for "purity" standards.

Folks like Bobb, who have small to midsized businesses "geared toward a smaller scale," worry more about such surburban and urban problems as lawn chemicals and pesticides.

"We are more concerned that the honey is as natural as possible," said Bobb, who has hives, among other locations, at the Morris Arboretum in the city and Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square. "Suburbia has more pesticides than you realize."

Juday agreed. "Even the so-called organic things that people use, they're nonselective," she said. "They'll kill every bug that comes into contact with them." *

Deborah Woodell, a Daily News sports copy editor, blogs about honey at

latinwordforhoney.blogspot.com.