They cancelled the Honey awards...

One of our surviving spring queens - a beauty!

What's new on the farm:

The other day I came across a piece of news that surprised me.

Every two years, the International Federation of Beekeepers hosts a conference called Apimondia. One of the events at Apimondia is the "World Beekeeping Awards."

This year, the Apimondia is being hosted in Denmark. I was curious about the agenda, so I started reading about the events.

It was then when I found out that the World Beekeeping Awards would not have "Honey" as a category this year.

What?? How can you not judge honey at a beekeeping conference?

It turns out that during the last two competitions, there were too many honey entries that failed laboratory testing.

From their website: "The lessons learned from Canada 2019 and Chile 2023 were that adequate testing was impossible if we are to award winning honey at the Congress."

Andrew and I attended the 2019 event in Canada and saw 45% of the entries disqualified after lab testing.

It was shocking to walk into a room with the honey entries and see all the honey jars with the "disqualified" sign on them.

And to tell you the truth, those jars didn't look any different from the real honey jars, to my eye.

As a non-profit organization, I'm guessing that they didn't have the financial resources to put into testing every single entry for the Awards.

Isn't that a sad state of affairs for our industry?

Honey is expensive to make. You have to care for livestock, the climate has work in your favor, you have to manage disease, and you have to do a lot of manual labor.

Sugar is cheaper to make. Sugar is a monoculture grown at mass scale with a lot of machinery and automated equipment.

If you're selling honey, it might be tempting to see how you can make your "honey" cost you a bit less, but stay the same price for the consumer.

It makes me sad that even at an international beekeeping event, we've even lost the ability to judge real honey among beekeepers and the industry.

Honey Carrot Cake:

On a happier note, Easter is coming up and with that is a reason to be eating CARROT CAKE!

Honey is an ideal sweetener for a dessert like carrot cake because it makes the cake really moist and the sweetness from the honey is richer and warmer than regular white sugar.

Check out this recipe by Natasha's Kitchen for a moist and delicious carrot cake that is sweetened with honey and applesauce.