Mike asked
>Looking at the HACCP guidelines (quick glance) I wonder what is included in your day long class in order to get certified. Seems like there were a lot of areas to be covered in food preparation and wondered just how many applied to the processing and packaging of honey.

I think that Peter John Keating  said very well in his post  about HACCP that

> It's really commonsense put onto paper.

What we have been doing is to develop guidance to beekeepers to write their own HACCP for the system that they operate. Basic idea is to figure out what mistakes beekeeper can do in order to make the honey not fit for human consumption according to our local laws.  At the same time answers are written - how to avoid and what to do if you made a mistake.

Main points are
- water content ( in order to prevent fermenting)

- exclusion of all residues from antibiotics ( Here any residues men that the honey must be destroyed. Actually there is a proposal to make the use of antibiotics illegal in the whole country, the decision comes on few months)

- control the heating and the storage temperatures so that the HMF content of honey stays either below 15 ( a standard for good quality  Finnish honey sold under special label) or below 40 mg/ kg as a general upper limit

- correct label information, for example we must print to every jar ' not recommended for children under 1 year' because of possibility of botulism. Even though there has not been any cases  of botulism coming from honey in our country.

- Cleaning instructions for the honey house


Basic plan for a small beekeeper is about 10 - 15 pages, and he has to fill in every year notes for 3 - 10 pages. The training I am giving now takes about 4 days. I have also had longer courses for about 20 days during a year.

The law is the same for all packers, big and small. Here practicly everyone packs at least some honey for sale, and therefore everyone should have HACCP plan. We are not that far yet, but very soon almost all bigger beekeepers have things right. Remember that the small beekeepers average 5 hives ...

The canadian haccp plan is for bigger companies and therefore different from ours, but worth taking a look.

http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/fssa/polstrat/haccp/honmie/honmiee.shtml

Ari

Central Finland, 6 weeks till bees fly

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