Honey Shortage Worldwide

Honey shortage worldwide is caused by numerous influences. Bad weather, bad nectar flow due to bad weather, poor colony buildup prior to honey flow, hive decline and NOT AS MANY BEES as we used to have all add up to honey shortage and higher honey prices.

How will the honey shortage affect the average consumer that says, “Oh it doesn’t affect me, I don’t eat honey”? Ice cream is sweetened with honey. The biggest consumer of honey is bakeries. These industries receive the fuel cost increase and now the sweetener cost increase. The honey shortage is only the FIRST indicator that we have a HUGE problem. It is true that many people do not consume the preferable healthy honey for sweetening. However poor weather and hive decline directly affect our food sources globally! Many fruits and vegetables are dependent on honey bees to pollinate the plants before a fruit or vegetable can begin to develop. Without honey bees pollinating the flora our food sources would shrink to 1/2 in two years worldwide. We must discover the cause of hive decline before disaster falls.

Honey shortages will continue to drive the cost of honey up. China and Brazil, the two largest exporters of honey to the US declare that poor weather and hive decline has caused poor crops of honey again. To prevent the global honey shortage from getting out of hand we need a bumper crop of honey in 2008. Honey shortage can be overcome if there are regional bumper honey crops. However our honey reserves have been tapped and now need to be replenished. Gourmet Honey, Raw Honey and monofloral honey that sell for premium prices because of the extensive labor to produce will see prices go even higher as less honey is produced.

To compound the honey shortage, China honey was found to have traces of antibiotics in the honey and this has caused the Chinese honey to be banned for sale in Britain and the US. Most supermarket honey is a blend of 75% foreign honey with the remainder gathered domestically. Fewer beekeepers are in the honey business as the result of hard work and low pay for long hours. Support your local beekeeper, buy specialty gourmet honey and raw honey to show your support for such a vital link in your future food source!
honey shortage,gourmet honey

Technorati Tags: honey shortage, gourmet honey

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 05th, 2008 at 4:15pm and is filed under Honey Bees, Nectar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.