More Manuka Madness

I've been sorting out things I take to the talks I give and for display at the Farmer's markets and came across the stuff I have on Manuka honey. Apart from it's alleged magical powers I did a couple of blogs about the ridiculous prices being charged for it here and here.

The most expensive Manuka I found was on the Bodykind web site and out of curiosity I re-visited the site to find the price of the honey had gone down to under £80 a jar.

Old price

New price

I noticed a couple of things.
Firstly the current ad has a blurb that wasn't in the original ad about

Manuka Health MGO 550+ is 100% pure Manuka Honey straight from the breath taking landscapes of New Zealand.....................................

Exactly the same wording as in their email to me when I asked them why it was so expensive.

Also, although the price has gone down a bit, the new add says

'reduced from £99.99 - saving you 20%'.

So the price was £83 that went up to £100 and down to £80

Bodykind also stock another brand of Manuka

£113 for a jar of honey. Wow, but at least its less than the £162 it used to be.

The ad talks about being

 'tested for its Methylglyoxal [MGO] by a certified laboratory...................'.

As far as I knew there was no agreed test for Manuka honey which lead to a series of meaningless acronyms [UMF,NPA, MGO] used to rate the honey's 'goodness', so I did some Googling to find that by coincidence on the 12th December the New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industries announced a test for Manuka honey to take effect from the 5th February that was to apply to exported honey.
Only honey that meets the requirements can be called Manuka honey

Reading about the new requirements they seem to open a whole new overpriced can of over hyped. worms.
More of which later

What is 'Local Honey'?

Something I am asked all the time is 'Is this local honey?' which is often followed up by 'Local honey is supposed to be good for you'.
Unfortunately I have no idea what 'local' means so I don't attempt to answer this and just tell them where my bees are and let them decide. I try not to comment on the 'good for you'bit.

I don't know of any accepted definition of 'local' but some Farmer's Markets require produce to be made within a certain distance of the market, usually about 30 miles, but this has nothing to do with 'being good for you' but more an 'air miles' thing
I used to do a market at Stony Stratford [about 25 miles away] and once someone said he wouldn't buy the honey as it wasn't 'local'. I never had anybody else at the market who had a problem.
My regular markets are at Bromham [6 miles away] and Potton [15 miles] and nobody has ever had a issue with where my honey comes from.
So is the boundary of 'local' less than 25 miles? Bees normally travel a maximum of 5 miles to forage so is my honey 'local' to Bromham or Potton?
If it is, then why is the apparently magical Manuka honey so 'good for you' when it comes from 6000 miles away?

All honey is 'good for you' in the sense it has potential medicinal properties. ALL honey.
As everyone knows, bees make honey from the nectar of plants. Different plants produce different types of honey in terms of its colours and taste but bees do the same thing with all types of flowers. Nectar is watery and contains sucrose and the bees have a lot of work to do converting the nectar into honey by substantially reducing the water content and also breaking down the sugars in the nectar to sugars more easily digestible.
In winter the bees don't hibernate and want to expend as little energy as possible so its beneficial to feed on more easily digestible sugars So they add enzymes to the nectar to break down sucrose [a disaccharide] into glucose and fructose - monosaccharides.
As part of this process some of the sucrose is converted into gluconic acid which in turn produces hydrogen peroxide. This makes the honey acidic and is partly responsible for its medicinal properties.
Different plants produce different proportions of the sugars which will be reflected in the amounts in the honey but I have never seen anything that measures this. In any event bees make honey from any type of flower they can find. Although I could examine the pollen to find out what plants they are foraging on, I have no real idea of what they are foraging on

Its quite possible for a bee keeper to produce honey that is 'local' to somebody but it has been heated, micro filtered and blended reducing if not removing any medicinal properties.
For this reason I prefer to call my honey 'unprocessed'

Also I have no idea of what 'good for you' means. Is non local honey bad for you? How do you measure 'good' - with a Goodometer?

I expect the whole 'good for you' thing is tied up with the myth of honey being good for hay fever.
This is based on honey containing pollen from 'local' flowers. I did a blog about this and there doesn't seem to be any basis for this. Its possible for someone to live 'locally' yet the flowers in their area are completely different to the flowers in my bees area.
Is there any difference between say Oil Seed Rape flowers that are 'local'and OSR flowers from 50 miles away. Is the pollen different?

When I started doing markets my display sign for the honey referred to 'Local Honey'. It now says just 'Honey'

January Update

The shortest day has passed, a New Year starts and gradually we edge towards the start of the bee keeping season.
I've been away for a couple of weeks but before we left I checked the fondant stocks on the hives.
In Ravensden 3 colonies out of 10 needed new blocks and in Scald End all needed some more.
Like people, different bee colonies have different characteristics. Some calm, some not so. Despite being a 'non interventionist' job and the temperature  being a few degrees above freezing, the Headbanger Bees, Ravensden 3 and Scald End 4 just had to come out to say hello.

The main winter job is treating the bees for the varroa mite with oxalic acid. Not a particularly fun job  but it hopefully reduces the amount of varroa on the bees and gets them ready for the spring.
Its done during the winter as the oxalic acid would kill any bee larvae but this is minimal as the queen would have already stopped laying eggs.
I'll be doing this in the next week or so.

Bees on the internet  

Honey bees do not hibernate. The Queen stops egg laying, the drones are dead and the colony reduces to about half of what it was in summer. To preserve their food stores they 'ball up' in the center of the hive and try to move as little as possible and preserve heat.
The queen is in the center of the bees and they keep themselves warm by slight fluttering of their wing muscles. Like penguins they take it in turn to be on the cold outside of the ball.
Below is an extract from a YouTube video about bees in winter.

Yet more bees.

Every year Sue asks me if I will be getting any more bees. The problem with this is that its actually quite difficult to control. I'm with Homer Simpson when he says 'if somethings hard to do then don't do it'. So I don't.
Come June time when swarming starts its difficult not to get more colonies. Although I don't broadcast the fact that I could collect swarms for people, some will inevitably turn up and what am I supposed to do with them?
Also for the bees I have now, if I managed to split them during the swarming season I could have up to another 18 potential colonies. It is suggested that after a colony has been split and the swarming instinct goes away, you re-unite the two colonies again and 'let them fight it out' to keep control over the number of colonies you have.
For some reason this doesn't appeal to me but saying that the amount of time and money spent on the bees obviously increases with the number of colonies you have so I will be careful. Maybe.

However I am very keen to populate my beloved Top bar Hive.

So using some of the vast cash reserves  built up by North Bedfordshire Holdings in a private offshore hedge fund account from the sales of honey at farmer's markets , I have bought a colony specifically for the TBH.
It is called a package rather than a colony or nuc as it is just a box of bees with a queen in a special compartment and will probably look like this.

The reason I am getting a package is a normal colony comes with the bees on frames that can just be dropped into a normal hive but don't fit a TBH.
I've paid a deposit but it won't be ready for collection until May, perhaps June.
New colonies rarely produce any 'retail' honey in their first year but I'm not bothered as I have no intention of extracting any honey from the TBH anyway.

Markets aren't all bad

Although there is much to dislike about markets - days of preparation, setting up, selling stuff, clearing up, putting stuff away, there are bits that are good fun.
When I started doing markets I would say 'yes' to anybody that asked me to come to an event and I found myself doing an event, perhaps two, most weekends and the thrill rapidly wore off but the emotional scars of the horrors of Sandy Market still remain.
I decided I would only do the markets I like doing although it meant I stopped doing a Market at St Neots where I took the most I have ever taken at a regular market.
So now I only do the quarterly market at Potton and the monthly market at Bromham Mill.
Potton is more urban and Bromham Mill is a lovely environment and they both have a nice atmosphere and there was Carol singing at both markets in December [busy girl, Carol] and there are often musicians playing at Potton.
Having done the markets for a couple of years I now have a number of regular customers who I have got to know and we have a chat about stuff and perhaps they buy some honey.
At Potton I got my first ever Christmas Card from a customer, Matt and Stacey who earlier in the year had a trip out to see the bees and despite me breaking Matt's glasses and him being stung in the forehead within a couple of minutes of arriving, want to have another session this Summer.
At Potton I've also got to know a family that have twin girls and apparently they like coming to the markets and wear the bee badges I gave them.
At the September market their Mum said they had made some pictures for me.

Add caption

The orange on the middle bee is a crown as she is the Queen bee

The black on the bees are their stingers.

At the December market their Mum said they had seen something they wanted to give me for Christmas.

A glass bee. How nice is that?