Colony Collapse Disorder And Counterfeit Honey
How is honey production thriving while bees vanish?
In 2022, Grand View Research valued the global honey market at USD 9.0 billion. During that time, United States beekeepers lost 48.8% of their managed colonies. The next year, the global honey market value increased to USD 9.45 billion. Despite year after year of losing US honey bees, the market has continued to increase production and profits when it comes to honey. How is this possible?
Part of this has to do with popularity, as demand increases so does the price, but the US has also increasingly imported honey to offset this decline.
Colony Collapse Disorder
Under the second largest insect order, Hymenoptera, honey bees are incredibly social creatures. A honey bee colony consists of a single queen, a few hundred male drones, and between 20,000 to 80,000 female worker bees. Humans define a city as having around 50,000 inhabitants. Bees are able to cram a city’s worth in people within a single colony.
What happens when half of the residents within a city vanish? Colony collapse disorder(CCD) is a phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees within a given colony vanish, leaving behind a queen, food, and a few male drones to care for the remaining immature bees. This was first discovered during the winter of 2006–2007 when beekeepers started noticing abnormal population changes. Colonies without enough worker bees end up dying out because they simply cannot function.
The EPA still isn’t sure what exactly is causing CCD, but they have a few narrowed focused ideas:
- Invasive honey bee pests
- New or emerging diseases causing additional loses
- Pesticide poisoning from crops or mite control
- Local habitat changes where the bees forage
- Additional stresses from how beekeepers manage colonies
- A combination of multiple factors
CCD is a Western issue though because as colonies declined in North America and Europe, they increased in Asia, South America, Africa, and Oceania. However, while global population has doubled in the last 75 years, honey production has only increased by half that.
How is honey production still increasing? The answer is fake honey.
Honey Supply Increasing
The biggest incident of food fraud in US history came from honey in 2013 when an importer shipped faked or modified Chinese honey through other countries before arriving in the US. The goal was to hide the origin and avoid $180 million in shipping duties.
Dubbed “Honey-Gate,” this incident speaks to a larger issue where some suppliers, instead of farming honey bees, have turned to modifying or faking honey for more profits. True honey-beekeeping and hive management is a detailed and laborious process. Manufacturers looking to avoid this either dilute real honey with plant-based syrups, like high-fructose corn syrup, or chemically modify plant-based syrups to look like honey-bee-made honey.
This is done to increase the volume of honey produced while lowering production costs. By chemically changing how honey looks, manufacturers are able to beat import tests. Since honey is environment dependent, laboratories are able to examine a honey sample and identify its origin. The Netflix documentary show “Rotten” highlighted how technical the honey testing process is.
Half of the European honey market is comprised of fake honey. 10% of imported honey was denied in 2021 and 2022 for failing honey tests performed by the FDA.
Why Does This Matter?
When we purchase a product, we expect it to be authentic. Many consumers wouldn’t buy honey if they knew it wasn’t true honey. The idea of buying a bottle of high-fructose corn syrup to spoon into a drink makes most shudder. In more recent years, honey has been praised as a healthy sugar filled with antioxidants and promoting heart health. People love honey, but they want a genuine product. So what can do to make sure what we buy is real?
There are a few ways to solve this crisis on a personal level:
- Buy local honey— The easiest is to simply buy from local beekeepers and promote local colonies. Buying from local places promotes domestic honey suppliers and ensures that the honey is genuine. Farmers markets, artisanal shops, and other more local markets often have keepers promoting their produced honey.
- Buy from reputable brands — If local honey is hard to find, buy from a reputable brand. Many people have asked for quality brands in the past, and Reddit threads have crowdsourced recommendations on the topic.
- Ask questions and seek answers — Be curious about where your honey comes from and look for questions you’ve considered. Where does your favorite brand of honey supply honey from?
- Buy vegan honey — According to scientists, bees are sentient and some vegans find it unethical to consume the honey they produce. An alternative to this is vegan honey. While fake honey is often produced from syrups, vegan attempts to recreate how honey bees produce honey without including bees in the process. It’s still a budding science, but it’s making progress.
At the end of the day, honey is a loved home staple. That’s why it’s so important to know that what you buy is truly what you wanted.
