> Has anybody an indication of the floral sources for honey originating
> from the Republic of China?

I don't, personally, but I am sure the information is readily available.
China is ahuge country with many climactic regions, farming crops and
practices, and natural areas.  I assume a Google search would turn up quite
a bit of info.

> HFCS is my guess
>
> The bigger question might be how much of the stuff the're sending
> over would even would qualify as being called honey.
>
> My understanding is the majority of it is ultra-filtered and has some
> form of sugar added. It would be hard to perform any pollen analysis
> on any residues.
>
> Check out this recent article which reports 75% of the product sold as
> honey in Tiawan is fake!

China produces a wide variety of products and their entrepreneurs excel at
giving the customer exactly what he wants.  This is the problem.  We are
getting what our buyers demand and what our regulators permit.

If the US and Canada are importing poor quality, adulterated or
misrepresented honey, we can only blame the buyers, all the way from the
undiscrimination and misled 'housewife' up to the price-driven packer's
purchasing agent, and, frankly, I'd also place a lot of the blame on the
generations of North American beekeepers who have stood idly by and let our
product deteriorate from a pure, local, varietal product to a mass blended,
denatured product and allowed firms to market products with the word 'honey'
on them that contain little if any honey.  If the sweetners in Honey Nut
Cheerios (for one example among many) have been allowed to contain almost
zero honey, but use our word, how long did we think it would be until all
products with the word 'honey' on the label contained almost zero real
honey -- including the jars labelled, "Honey"?

We have allowed others to take over the responsibility for packing and
marketing our product, and,in the process, lost control of it.  Nobody but
the beekeeper really cares.  Even the co-ops that are run by beekeepers
blend, heat, and filter the honey to the point where it might as well IMO be
corn syrup.

Is anyone really surprised at the present conundrum, when beekeepers easily
raise hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to countervail foreign
products, but have never been able to manage to raise and employ funds to
deal adequately with the destruction of honey, both in name and in nature,
by packers and manufacturers of food products?

We've been going down this road a long time, taking the easiest path, and we
are now approaching the logical end of this progression.  What we see should
be no surprise, and we have nobody to blame but ourselves.

IMO, anyhow.

allen
http://www.honeybeeworld.com/

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
-- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/BEE-L for rules, FAQ and  other info ---
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::