Hi All

Chris described UK Organic Standards thus: 

> For practical beekeeping purposes they are unmeetable, 
> even by hobby beekeepers.

Here are examples of the criteria which need to be met for certification as organic:

Origin of bees: 
- must be from division of colonies or swarms derived from stock kept to these organic criteria (except for 10% of the stock which can be brought in from non-certified sources annually) 

Siting of colonies: 
- plants in a radius of 3km must be 'spontaneous vegetation' or organic crops or 'crops treated with low environmental impact'
- the more stringent Soil Association standards require a 4 mile (6.4 km) separation, which may be why, in our crowded islands, no-one in the UK is yet able to produce organic honey to these standards
- 'maintain enough distance' (unspecified) from urban centres, motorways, industrial areas, waste dumps etc

Feeding:
- must be left with sufficient reserves of honey and pollen to survive the winter
- in extreme climatic conditions, can be fed with organic honey, preferably from the same unit (or possibly organic sugar syrup in some situations)

Diseases:
- prevent by using hardy stock and 'certain practices' including regular renewing of beeswax
- phytotherapeutic and homeopathic products preferred to allelopathic ones
- permitted allelopathic products (within the limits of the law) can be the acids and thymol, menthol, eucalyptol or camphor
- if you need to treat with other chemicals, colonies must be placed in isolation apiaries, all wax replaced, and then you need to wait one year for re-conversion to certified organic

Forbidden practices:
- destruction of bees to harvest honey
- mutilating the queen by clipping wings
- using synthetic chemicals as repellants at harvest (sorry Jim)

All in all, a fairly onerous set of criteria, which will have the effect of keeping organic production very restricted and relatively inefficient.  Here in Scotland I could probably meet the criteria more easily than Chris, but then I'd be regularly travelling long distances to sites sufficiently isolated from conventional agriculture and other man-dominated sites - hardly sustainable beekeeping.

best wishes

Gavin

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