Traceable, sustainably farmed and fully flavoured.
Having grown up with a grandad who kept bees, I never had any doubt as to where our honey came from. I have vivid memories of ramshackle hives against heather-covered Northumbrian hills, my grandad extracting honey outside the house wearing his beekeeping clothes and my grandma labelling the amber jars. I was very young when he kept them, and now I wish I’d paid more attention and not taken his honey for granted.
It’s easy to take for granted things that are readily available, even something as wondrous as honey! Supermarket shelves can divorce us from origin, labour, and production, and we tend to trust that what’s written on the back of a packet, tin, or jar is accurate. However, in recent years ‘honey fraud’, in which honey is adulterated with cheap sugar syrups, has become a widespread and contentious global issue.
The fraudulent honey comes from some Asian manufacturers and is sold cheaply to European consumers as it can be difficult to detect with standard authenticity analysis. Statistics on this are alarming, especially in the UK, where it is widespread in supermarkets’ cheapest own brand honey. It destroys beekeepers’ livelihoods, erodes consumer confidence and even potentially harms health.
It’s important for us as consumers to be mindful of where our food comes from and fair trade foods with a traceable provenance are a great way to make sure we know what we’re getting. ‘Mama Buci’ honey stocked in Harrogate Fair Trade Shop is the real deal! It’s pure honey made by wild African bees from the Zambian Miombo forests, collected in specially designed and hand-built top-bar hives which hang in the trees. Education is key for the enterprise, encouraging more sustainable ways of working with the land; and profits go back into helping more families acquire beehives as well as supporting local communities.
Mama Buci produce two different types of honey: a summer harvest and a winter harvest as the wildflowers the bees take their pollen from vary from season to season. Each honey has a unique flavour and is a different shade of amber.
It’s a long time since my grandad’s bees, but honey brings back fond memories of family and a place special to me. Mama Buci means ‘mother honey’, reminding us that we’re all interconnected, with one another and the natural world. By buying and supporting ethically sourced, fairly traded honey we affirm a shared sense of kinship and accountability to each other and our planet as global citizens.
Emily Hunter, Volunteer
