There have been a few articles lately in the news regarding honey, mainly in response to a Food Safety News study that was published this week. To sum it up, the report found that most honey purchased in stores had been highly processed to the point that all the pollen had been removed. Aside from no longer supplying healthy benefits by containing pollen, removing all traces of pollen also makes it impossible to track the location of origin for honey if it turns out to be contaminated or otherwise harmful.
A few of us on this blog and many of our readers have become amateur bee keepers in the past few years. It is an enjoyable hobby and we’ve had a good time researching and posting articles on honey, its health benefits and general information on bee keeping and pointing out local classes and events focused around the hobby. With this background I feel that there is an easy solution to avoiding the problems with highly processed honey. In fact, the solution is quite simple.
Buy locally produced honey. This will help to support local businesses and keep your dollars local. You’ll obtain all the wonderful benefits of raw honey and be secure in the knowledge that you are supporting locally sourced food. This article on the Life Hacker web site sums it up quite well.
If you aren’t sure how or where to get local, raw honey just ask us and we’ll point you in the right direction.
You’ll only get the benefits of raw honey by buying local if your local providers provide raw honey.
Good point Ankle.
I like the local idea. A lot of farmer’s markets have at least one person selling their own honey.
I hope to enter the ranks of “amateur bee keeper” soon. After college and before my first “career” job, I worked with a pest control company that specialized in removing beehives from people’s houses, so I got a lot of first hand experience working with bees, but never kept any in boxes, and i don’t have the yard to keep any now.