Category: Bees

Fake Honey Sales Undermine Bee Pollination of Flowers

12/31/2023

By Terry Johnson, IPF Vice Chair

For many years the International Perfume Foundation (IPF) has been very proactive in supporting bees as being critical for returning flowers to nature.
Yet according to recent studies, this support is undermined by honey marketers who adulterate as much as 70% of the world’s supply of honey, making it the third most adulterated food, behind milk and olive oil.
“Honey can be faked and adulterated in many different ways to fraudulently control the market,” according to the World Honey Market. “Common strategies include diluting the honey with sugars or syrups or feeding corn syrup to the bees rather than allowing them to forage for pollen.”
The impact of this fake honey threatens domestic beekeepers’ existence, while bees are prevented from performing their key role as pollinators by fake honey factories, putting our entire food supply at risk. All because of the efforts to flood the US and EU honey markets with fake honey, primarily from China.
Again, from the World Honey Market: “Beekeepers in the United Kingdom have been hit particularly hard. The U.K. received 47% of Europe's honey imports from China in 2018, but a Honey Authenticity Project lab analysis of 11 supermarket brands found that none complied with E.U. labeling standards.”

Fake Honey Sales Undermine Bee Pollinations of Flowers

To summarize the issues involved:

Low prices from the largest honey exporter (China) make it very difficult for local beekeepers in the EU and the US from making a living.
Honey factories are feeding bees sugar to create honey-like products containing no pollen instead of having bees foraging for pollen, which means fewer flowers being pollinated.
The endgame of these fake honey marketing efforts appears to be to drive local beekeepers out of business and take complete control of the honey market with fake honey. So far, fake honey seems to be winning.

What can we do about these serious problems?

These issues about bees and their honey can have negative effects on everyone in natural essences, so alert your customers and social media networks about this urgent problem.
As with purchasing essential oils, it is vital to know your honey sources and emphasize the importance of pure, unadulterated bee honey for returning flowers to nature.
Buy honey locally whenever possible.
Support groups that are working to protect bees such as IPF and the World Honey Market.

0 Comments

Protect Honeybees

4/25/2018

4 Comments

International Bee Day 2018 is April 29. Let's add colors to bee’s lives in replanting flowers and plants they like. If you don’t have a garden, add some plants or flowers on your balcony and a small cup of water for bees.

Protect Honeybees
Latest reports were telling that agricultural plays an important role in the development of the health of honeybees. It was found out that the overall health of honeybees is greatly influenced by production in agriculture.
Many of our native plants require pollination to spread their seeds from plant to plant, and we depend on bees for agricultural production.
They also provide a way to reconnect with nature. By keeping bees in our garden and farms, it's a way for us to engage with our natural environment.

Everyone should contribute to the survival of bees
Bees are important not only for their production of honey but also for the survival of our natural foods. Bees and other pollinators are part of our important eco-system allowing us to enjoy fruits and vegetables.
Since regulators and politicians can play an important role in forbidding pesticides and promoting natural pest controls, then everyone has an important role to play in the protection of bees and pollinators.

Bees are important for our food production

The lack of fragrant flower fields on Earth is becoming a real problem for the bees.
Replanting flowers on the planet will also support the bee’s work.
The Perfume Industry should take a huge responsibility in the current decline of bees. Perfume used to be made from flowers and there were thousands of flower fields all over the planet giving work to millions of people. Since the chemical industry took over the cosmetic industry, flower fields have been replaced by synthetics and brands are giving consumers the image of flowers instead of real flowers.

Bees have a very powerful sense of smell, 100 times more powerful than a human’s.
Honeybees use their antennae to detect odor. According to research by the National Institutes of Health, published in the "Genome Research" journal, honeybees have 170 odor receptors, or chemoreceptors, in their antennae. This is high for an insect -- fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) have 62 receptors and mosquitos (Anopheles gambiae) have 79. The honeybee’s sense of smell is so sensitive that it can detect the trace of a scent in flight. This ability equips the bee to effectively and efficiently locate pollen-rich flowers. Once the scent is detected on the antennae, the bee’s hypersensitive olfactory path processes the information, enabling the bee to determine the relevance of the scent to their search for pollen. Honeybees use their sense of smell to locate other bees and for finding food as well.
In contrast to their highly developed sense of smell, the bee’s sense of taste is somewhat basic. They use their tongues, which contain taste buds, to detect sour, bitter and sweet -- the same range of taste detection that humans use -- but since they gather lots of information from smell, enabling them to taste before the pollen touches the tongue, they’ve effectively done all of the research necessary before the sustenance reaches their mouths. Since bees provide benefits to plants by means of pollination, plants have not evolved any defense mechanisms against bees. This means that no plants produce distasteful or harmful pollen.

In asking for Natural Perfumes, you can help the bees
In asking for Natural Perfumes, you can help change the whole perfume industry distribution chain. Asking for Natural Perfumes is, in effect, is asking the perfume industry to return to replanting flowers and plants instead of producing synthetic copies of flowers for perfumes in laboratories.

Creating our own little garden could also be a beautiful gift for bees.
Gardens are healing since plants have beneficial effects on human beings. Creating our own gardens in our back yards or on our balconies will help us to reconnect with nature and make a beautiful invitation for bees and other pollinators. Bees can also be thirsty, so add a small cup of water for them.
As strong thoughts are very powerful too, meditate for the bees and visualize them in their full happiness.
Join us every year on April 29 to celebrate Bee Day. Send us your activities for Bee Day and we will publish them.

Join our Facebook Group
To learn more about the important connection with natural foods, natural perfumes, flower fields and bees join our Bee group on Facebook Friends who like International Perfume Foundation like Bees

Donate to the International Perfume Foundation to support the flower field replanting program (World Perfume Heritage) for the bees.

4 Comments

Fake Honey Sales Undermine Bee Pollination of Flowers

Protect Honeybees

Authors

Archives

Categories

Contact

Home Introduction Plans Plants Workshops Blog Contact

Copyright 2021
Creezy Courtoy

Fake Honey Sales Undermine Bee Pollination of Flowers

Protect Honeybees

Authors

Archives

Categories

Contact

Home Introduction Plans Plants Workshops Blog Contact

Copyright 2021 Creezy Courtoy

Copyright 2021
Creezy Courtoy