"Food-safety experts have found that much of the honey sold in the United States isn't actually honey, but a concoction of corn or rice syrup, malt sweeteners or 'jiggery' (cheap, unrefined sugar), plus a small amount of genuine honey, according to Wired UK.

Worse, some honey — much of which is imported from Asia — has been found to contain toxins like lead and other heavy metals, as well as drugs like chloramphenicol, an antibiotic, according to a Department of Justice news release.

And because cheap honey from China was being dumped on the U.S. market at artificially low prices, Chinese honey is now subject to additional import duties. So Chinese exporters simply ship their honey to Thailand or other countries, where it is relabeled to hide its origins, according to NPR.org.

This international 'honey-laundering' scandal has now resulted in a Justice Department indictment of two U.S. companies and the charging of five people with selling mislabeled honey that also contained chloramphenicol.

Honey Solutions of Baytown, Texas, and Groeb Farms of Onsted, Mich., have agreed to pay millions of dollars in fines and implement corporate compliance measures following a lengthy Justice Department investigation.

'This is a huge deal for the industry. This is the first admission by a U.S. packer,' of knowingly importing mislabeled honey, Eric Wenger, chairman of True Source Honey, told NPR. True Source Honey is an industry consortium with an auditing system to guarantee the actual origin of honey.

Honey isn't the only food product subject to impurities and mislabeling. Olive oil is often cut with cheaper oils and sold at premium prices, a practice that's expected to expand as a shortage of the oil (caused by a 2012 drought in southern Europe) hits global markets."


'Honey Laundering' an International Scandal, Experts Say
Marc Lallanilla

"In January this year [2004], 14,000 jars labelled 'Produce of India' were stopped for testing at Felixstowe docks. The honey turned out to be contaminated with chloramphenicol, a wide-spectrum antibiotic banned in food production in most countries. In susceptible individuals, it can cause a fatal blood condition, aplastic anaemia. And the country most associated with the use of chloramphenicol on bees? China - whose honey had consequently been banned on health grounds by the EU in 2002. Commenting on the Felixstowe seizure, Vijay Sardana, head of the Indian trade body CITA, said that India believed Chinese honey was being smuggled into India through Nepal, repackaged and then sold abroad.

China rejects such accusations, saying that competitor nations have a vested interest in peddling untruths to get China's honey pushed off the market. And Beijing has received new support from Brussels, which has just rescinded the import ban after EU inspectors confirmed that China was moving to stop chloramphenicol use and establish an effective control and detection system for food safety.

During the two-year EU ban, the disappearance of legal Chinese honey caused upheaval. For years it had been a basic ingredient in blended honeys because of its sweetness and cheapness; now packers worldwide switched to Argentine, Mexican and east-European honey. Yet chloramphenicol-tainted honey kept turning up.

In the export market there was a dramatic increase in honey on offer from Vietnam, for instance, where the bees had gone into such an overdrive that a country not known as a significant honey exporter had thousands of tons for sale. And there was something else. Thomas Heck, a director of the leading British honey importer Kimpton Brothers, recalls being offered a container-load of Vietnamese honey two years ago. 'Standard Vietnamese honey is dark, but this was white,' he said. 'It wasn't from one of our usual suppliers. We turned it down.'

Singapore suddenly discovered a penchant for beekeeping - surprising in a country which, according to Bee Culture magazine, 'has no bees' in the commercial sense. Overnight in early 2002, just as Chinese honey was banned by the EU, Singapore became the world's fourth biggest honey exporter and the tonnage of honey sold to Australia, which in 2001 had been zero, leaped to nearly 1,500 tonnes.

As emails and faxes kept arriving at honey packers in Europe and the US offering cheap honey from some unlikely places, investigators came to a startling conclusion: contaminated honey from China was being relabelled and offered for sale as the produce of third-world countries. In the past 12 months, honey labelled as the produce of Cyprus, Tanzania, Moldova, Romania, Argentina, Portugal, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria and Vietnam has turned up in European ports, honey blenders and supermarkets, testing positive for chloramphenicol. In this period, it has been found in 14 consignments intercepted in Europe and the EU's 'rapid alert' food safety system in Brussels has been notified."


A bitter taste of honey
Michael Durham

"Europe has sided with the bees and wants to put a ban on insecticides, but MEP Robert Sturdy says this could reduce yields for some key crops by 20% and cost the EU economy up to 4.5 billion euros a year and 50,000 farming jobs.

Robert Sturdy, MP The European Commission has presented draft proposals recommending the end of three vital insecticides, Mr Sturdy, MEP for this region, says.

The EU proposals follow a report by the European Food Safety Authority into the affect these chemical products have on bee health. Three insecticides would be affected, clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiametoxam. The Commission proposes that farmers would be banned from using these neonicotinoid insecticides on crops that are attractive to bees including rapeseed, sunflowers, maize and cotton.

If the Member States of the EU agree with this discussion paper, then the Commission would like the ban in place by July and for it to be in effect for two years before a review.

The UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) after reviewing the evidence last year, rejected a ban on neonicotinoids. It stated that the evidence was not conclusive and that further research was required before changing any legislation."


Bees get the bird from our MEP
from: www.cambridge-news.co.uk

"Some fear higher world food prices are making food counterfeiting the next big global trend. Counterfeit food is a way to steal millions and put food safety at extreme risk...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has its own police force for tackling fraudulent foods and drugs...

At last month’s 9th Annual Anti-Counterfeiting and Brand Protection Summit held in Midtown West, NY, a fact sheet from DuPont said counterfeiting cost U.S. businesses $200 billion to $250 billion annually, affecting 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Food and beverages are only a slice of that, of course, but consider that Russia has documented $3.3 billion in annual losses due just to counterfeit vodka, the total for food and beverage products would probably be staggering.

Michigan State University’s Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection Program has developed a national data base for tracking counterfeit food by looking for such characteristics as:

-Diluted oil, 16 percent of counterfeit food cases involve olive oil.

-Diluted milk, 14 percent of counterfeit food involved watered down milk.

-Adulterated honey, 7 percent of counterfeit food involved were adulterated sugar and corn.

MSU’s Anti-Counterfeiting program even has a top ten list for food most likely to be phony. Making the list are: vanilla extract, maple syrup, grape wine, apple juice, coffee, orange juice, saffron, honey, milk, and olive oil."



Food Safety Endangered Worldwide by Increased Food Counterfeiting
By Dan Flynn

"Last year, Dr. Melissa Bateson and her colleagues at Newcastle University in the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution at the Institute published a fascinating study in the journal Current Biology about negative cognitive biases in bees.

Dr. Bateson was particularly interested in figuring out whether bees have emotions, so she decided to test them.   Whether insects have emotions is a controversial subject, and a difficult one to study since bees cannot tell you if they are sad, etc… as a human can (even though they seem to show when they are angry pretty easily).

The study they conducted looked to see what honeybees do when their hive is shaken.  Shaking a hive simulates a predatory attack, like that of a honeybadger or bear looking for its next meal.

It seems that after being shaken for 60 seconds, honeybees consider any subsequent ambiguous stimulation as another attack, or punishment.   Honeybees expect that any further stimulation is more bad news for the colony, demonstrating this by their behavior and even chemically.  Shaken bees have lower levels of key neurotransmitters used for learning and memory – dopamine, octopamine, and serotonin.   In humans, lower levels of dopamine are believed to be associated with reduced motor control, concentration, and cognition.

The study is fascinating as it might provide evidence that honeybees have something some might consider an emotion (others might consider it just a reaction).  At the least, it shows an invertebrate that has a similar reaction – both chemically and behaviorally – as seen in humans.

What struck me most is how this is how the part of a survival instinct that cause honeybees seem to act just like many investors do when something bad news comes out about one of the stocks he or she owns."

What Investors Can Learn From Honeybees
David Maris

A blog about a blog.

"When I was a child, I was deeply petrified of bees.  To be honest, I still get a little uneasy whenever those flying monsters buzz around my head.  In the last couple of years, however, I have come to appreciate bees more than ever before.  As a matter of fact, I am convinced that many of the problems that occur among evangelical Christians today could be solved by bees.  Let me explain…"

The $15 Billion Secret Of The Honey Bee & The Disappearance Of Evangelicals
Jamal Jivanjee