Dear all,
Discussion of honey contaminated with insecticide or mineral oil must
have been buzzing around in the back of my head last night when I was
reading a gardening mag and came across a description of a species
called 'Aconitum' that said almost as an afterthought 'all parts of
the plant are highly poisonous'. Does that mean the nectar too? I
asked myself. And if the bees take it, is the poison altered at all, or rendered
harmless within the hive? Does it remain as a trace?
The only poisonous plant I've ever had in my garden is the foxglove.
These grow wild in the British countryside and the bumble bees make
an awful racket in their long, tubular flowers, so they're definitely
visited by bees (although I've never actually seen a honeybee in
one).
Does anyone know anything about this subject? There are quite a lot
of plants whose poisonous parts include the flowers, yet I've never
heard of anyone dying from a poisoned batch of honey. There are
plenty of references to death and/or madness ensuing from other kinds
of food that have become contaminated. Two examples that come to mind
are ergot contamination of rye and corn cockle contamination of wheat
(corn cockle is a poisonous weed of grainfields that has been almost
eradicated in Britain). Honey, however, only ever seems to be
contaminated in the course of the human processing that takes place
after it leaves the hive - by overheating, for example, or (in the
days of skep hives) over-sulphuring. I would love to hear what all
you knowledgable beekeepers have to say about the possibility of
'natural' contamination since I'm a very novice beekeeper and still
don't properly understand what the bees get up to inside the hive.
 
Penny Munn