Honey Bees and Honey Flashcards
How can honey be adulterated?
- Sugars and sugar syrup
- Innapropriate antibiotic treatment
- Production
- Origin mislabelling
- Water added
What causes honey to crystallise?
Honey with more glucose then fructose crystallises
When are beehives active and why?
How do bees survive when not active?
What are the different bees in a hive?
Active hives only between spring and autumn when food is available
Over winter the queen and workers reduce their metabolic activity and survive on the honey reserves they have produced- needs to be replaced if humans take it (adulteration)
Bees-
one queen, thousands of workers (females), hundreds of drones (males)
Describe the lifecycle of normal bees?
Starts as eff born from a bee at bottom of wells, develops into a larva, pupa then adult
21 days for workers
12 days for drones
foraging worker bees work to death
What are the products of beekeeping?
Honey- clear, soft set, single source, monofloral
Wax
Royal jelly
Pollen
Propolis
Bee venom
How is an OV involved in honey production and labelling?
Export
Import of honey, royal jelly
Honey regulations-2015
Honey comp cannot be imported
British honey importers and packers association code of practice
What is the UK/EU definition of honey?
The natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera bees from:
- Nectar of plants
- Secretions of living plants
- Excretions of plant-sucking insects on living parts of plants (honeydew)
Bees collect, combine and transfer with specific substances of their own deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honey combs
What is the compositional criteria in honey regulations 2015?
- Honey consists essentially of different sugars, predominately fructose and glucose, as well as other substances such as organic acids, enzymes and solid particles derived from honey collection
- The colour varies from nearly colourless to dark brown
- Consistency can be fluid, viscous or partly to completely crystalised
- Flavour, and aroma can vary depending on plant of origin
- No food ingredient has been added including additives
- No other additions have been made to the honey
- Must as far as possible be free from organic or inorganic matters foreign
According to the Honey regulations 2015, what should honey not contain etc?
What does this not apply to?
Must not:
- Have any foreign tastes or odours
- Have begun to ferment
- Have an artificially changed acidity
- Have been heated in such a way that the natural enzymes have been destroyed or significantly inactivated
Doesn’t apply to bakers honey
No pollen or constituent of honey can be removed except where this is unavoidable in the removal of foreign inorganic or organic matter
Unless filtered
Describe the honey production process?
- Collected by the bee in the crop which becomes enlarged
- Transported to the beehive, transferred to workers and stored in the honeycomb where the water content is reduced from 70% to 20% then capped with wax
(nectar->honey) - Harvesting
- Traditional harvest when all cells on a frame capped- some 75%
- Shake test or refractometer to test water content
- Different collecting methods- on the honey comb, centrifuge, pressing
- Filtration after mild heating- under 40 degrees, removes debris from honeycomb and other contaminants
- Pasteurisation and ultrafiltration
How is honey pasteurised?
Why is honey ‘ripened’?
What is the purpose of microcrystalisation?
Extracted and cleaned using course filter
Flash heating to a high temperature then super filtered and quickly cooled
Will last 9 months in the store without granulating- little pollen
Honey is ripened after filtration to stand and ripen- this removes the air trapped in it during filtration before bottling
Microcrystalisation- helps avoid the formation of large crystals that eventually are solid
Why should honey not be overheated?
When honey is overheated- hexose sugars lose water and form HMF
HMF are genotoxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, DNA-damaging
Used as an indicator of quality- downgraded to bakers honey
How is honey quality categorised?
Diastase- enzyme in honey that is denatured by heat
Pollen-
monofloral- most pollen from one plant
regional- pollen from plants in that region
Caramel- added to give ‘right colour’- adulteration
Start grains- adultered with corn syrup
How is honey labelled?
Name or trade name
Country of countries of origin
Any special storage conditions
Best- before date
Lot- batch mark
Weight
Filtered honey needs to be labelled with a nutrition declaration of energy, fat, saturated, carbs and sugars
Controlled by Honey England regulations 2015
Country of origin labelling from 1 October 2022
What is this and what is the risk in the UK?
Aethina tumida- Small hive beetle infection
Breeding in the hive and destroying the brood
Not in the UK but there is a risk
