Food Safety for Beekeepers with Andy Pedley (287)

287 - Food Safety for Beekeepers with Andy Pedley

Regina: Good evening. This is Regina Rowe, the president Montgomery County Beekeeper's Association in Pennsylvania. We're having our general meeting this evening and we're 371 members strong.

Members: Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast.

Jeff Ott: Welcome to Beekeeping Today podcast presented by Betterbee your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.,

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Hey, thanks a lot Regina Rowe of the Montgomery County Beekeeper's Association. They're in Pennsylvania. Becky, there's another state down. We can just fill that one in with that golden honey color on our listener map.

Becky: I love it. We needed Pennsylvania. Thank you, thank you, thank you for sending that in, Regina.

Jeff: You're not going political on us on we need Pennsyl-- Oh, no, that's a whole different podcast. Sorry.

Becky: We could do something like the map, but I don't know. I don't know what we're campaigning for, Jeff, so I don't know-- I think it's just like let's just make our beekeeping family bigger and let's not talk about elections maybe.

Jeff: Oh, gosh, no, no. I did not want to go down. I opened the door and that was a mistake. I'm sorry.

Becky: We're voting for bees.

Jeff: We're voting for bees.

Becky: Our ticket is pro-bees and that's it.

Jeff: That's it.

Becky: Wouldn't it be lovely if all the politicians were arguing about was, wait, I think this habitat is much better for bees, and if we put this habitat down, the butterflies are going to like it too. Then another politician would say something like, but if we maybe plant over here, I think we could maybe increase our honey production for beekeepers. That's all they argued about. Wouldn't that be a happy world?

Jeff: My opponent doesn't know anything about habitat. Look at his backyard. It looks like it was from fertilizer commercial. Oh, my gosh.

Becky: I love that so much. I think my view of the world has changed and now I want that.

[laughter]

Jeff: I have a question for you. Have you ever dealt with maintaining a clean honey house?

Becky: The answer is yes. At the University of Minnesota, we have a lovely, lovely extracting room and a warming room. We have to obey University of Minnesota standards. Both when it was built and if they ever decided to spot-check us.

Jeff: I remember way back when in Ohio when I first started keeping bees seriously and producing honey, that the laws changed. Technically, if you produce so much honey, and I'll probably getting this wrong and someone can correct me if I am wrong, is that you had to be prepared if you sold so much honey or so many pounds of honey to have your processing facility inspected. All of us backyard beekeepers were saying, I don't want you in my kitchen or I don't want you in my basement. I don't want you in my wherever. That's the first time I ever considered honey house sanitation. I was completely blind and ignorant up until that point.

Becky: The details, oh my gosh, when it comes to sanitizing the five-gallon buckets, and do you wash the jars? Do you not wash the jars? There's a lot to think about and to learn.

Jeff: Well, that's why I thought our guest today would be a really interesting guest on a beekeeping podcast, because he's written a book on honey house safety or food safety in a honey house. Our guest is Andy Pedley. I'm looking forward to this discussion. I expect it to be very enlightening.

Becky: I think our operations are going to get just a little bit better after listening to what Andy has to say.

Jeff: I just built a new honey house processing area in my old horse barn. Now it is clean, et cetera, and so forth. I've built it. It's really nice, but would I ever want a food safety inspector in there?

Becky: No offense to any food safety inspectors, but nobody wants to be inspected. I'm just saying. That's why it's great if beekeepers continue to maintain their own high standards so that there's not a massive triggering of, let's get everything inspected, right? There's a reason why we need to pay attention to the rules, even if the states or our jurisdictions don't require us to. There's really good justification for us to pay attention and to do our best to keep that honey clean.

Jeff: Let's talk to Andy coming right up, but first, a quick word from our sponsors.

[music]

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Jeff: While you're at the strong microbial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive. Their regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. I hope you've had a good break. Sitting across the big virtual Beekeeping Today podcast table is Andy Pedley. Andy, welcome to the show.

Andy Pendley: Pleasure to be here.

Becky: Andy, I'm so glad you could join us. I've seen you at least in part of a presentation that you gave about food safety and honey, and I can't wait to hear more.

Jeff: Becky and I were talking before we started recording here that most people, they just bought all the honey and they just put it out on the farm market shelf or they sell it to their local farm market, don't really give a whole lot of consideration to food safety and the implications of that. Your book, I saw the title and I said this is a worthy topic, because it is an important subject for all beekeepers to at least have a fundamental understanding of food safety or honey safety. I'm ahead of myself, because I'm excited about the topic.

Becky: You are ahead of yourself, Jeff.

Jeff: Some salt on my tail.

Becky: We need to know who Andy is.

Jeff: That's right. Andy, would you please tell us who you are and your background, and how you got started working with bees and honey?

Andy: My name is Andy. I'm a retired environmental health officer. Environmental health officers in the UK are the food enforcement people. My professional- we go into food shops, we go into factories, we go into markets, we go into all sorts of places and check that things are being done properly, but we enforce the food safety legislation. There are prosecutions of people doing things very badly, but also a few years ago, they realized that a much more productive way of doing things was to educate people. Explain to people why they're doing things, why something's important. That way they've achieved or I think a real improvement in food safety standards, and there are other little things as well.

I've been keeping bees for just over 30 years now. It occurred to me a few years ago, that actually this hadn't happened with beekeepers. There's a funny legal position for beekeepers and often we're outside the inspection and registration process. I was with a lady called Claire Waring, who edited Bee Craft magazine. I said to her, "Look, I'm in the HO. Would you like me to do an article on food safety?" She went, "Oh, yes, that would be great."

Now, I keep bees, I've kept for 30 years as I said, I've been to the HO for a long time. This is a bit daft of me. Fools rush in.

[laughter]

Andy: The reason it was foolish of me was because I hadn't actually done any food safety work for something like probably 20 or 30 years, previously.

[laughter]

Andy: I had done food safety work and then we go into specialisms. I started to write this article and spent a long time on it. I was very fortunate some of my colleagues were extremely supportive. We produced an article that went into Bee Craft and it got serialized into five parts. That was in 2009. That was the beginning of a bit of a journey for me, really, because it then became an interest of mine. How does food safety and beekeeping, not just honey production, but beekeeping, how do they relate together?

Over the subsequent years, I've kept an eye open, listened to things, done more research. I was asked to do talks at the National Honey Show and at local associations, so that's developed. Jerry from Northern Bee Books has been on at me for quite a long time to produce a book. You know what it's like? "Oh, yes, Jerry, I might do it one day, and it's going to be a lot of work." Then we have this thing we called Brexit. We didn't actually know what our law was going to be.

Then about two and a half years ago, it began to settle down. We thought we knew what the law was going to be. It became worth writing. I had some time, so I sat down and wrote it. We got it published just over two years ago now. That's the story of me and the book.

Jeff: You definitely bring a wealth of experience and background to the book. It's not just from the health office perspective, you're a beekeeper too. I'm really curious, as we get into this topic, to pick your brain a little bit because I don't know if I'd want you in my honey house at this point.

[laughter]

Becky: He's so nice and friendly.

Andy: I don't think I'll let me be in my honey house, to be honest with you.

[laughter]

Jeff: I wouldn't mind having you there. I'm just being a silly.

Becky: Jeff, now we all want to see your honey house. I just want to put that on the table. I'm hoping you share a picture when this podcast is released. No pressure.

Andy: It's a very busy place. I've worked it very carefully, but it's too small. It's a real problem, and if I have more space. Then the other thing is, I'm a bit of a collector. I've got 15 different uncapping tools, most of which I don't use. I still just use a fork, an uncapping fork, but I've tried everything out. I've got a lot of stuff there that doesn't get used and it would be a lot better if I cleared it all out as well.

[laughter]

Becky: This is confessions of a food safety inspector.

Jeff: Well, when people think about food safety or honey safety in today's world, today's beekeeper, they're often worried about contamination from the miticide or even the neighbor's pesticides. In a honey house, what is the fear? What are the contaminants of honey that beekeepers should worry about beyond the apistan strip or the other miticide?

Andy: The first thing to say is honey is an incredibly safe food. It has three antibacterial properties behind it. It's very rich in sugar, so bacteria can't reproduce in it, has hydrogen peroxide, and it's slightly acidic. All three of those combine together to give it its incredible antibacterial properties. I don't think there's a particular hazard with honey houses as long as they're reasonably well maintained and in reasonably good condition.

Obviously, you don't want cobwebs on the ceiling, they're going to drop down. You don't want ants getting your honey and other pests as well. The food safety legislation in the UK requires that food rooms are to quite a high standard, so things should be readily cleansable, work surfaces, that kind of thing. Honey by itself is actually a very safe product. The honey room itself, I don't think poses a huge hazard, but it obviously needs to be adequate and good enough. I'm more worried about things like the equipment that people use.

I don't know what it's like where you are, but there was a big legacy of secondhand equipment. People would be buying and selling stuff on eBay, and you can look on eBay now, and you'll probably find honey extractors such as 20, 30, 40 years old. Now, a lot of them are made out of tin plate. Tin plate is great, you buy your baked beans in tins, but in those days, they were made with lead solder.

Honey, as I mentioned, is acidic and it dissolves the lead. Old things like old extractors, old settling tanks are real no-nos. Nowadays, we need to have things like stainless steel or food grade plastic. I'm concerned about the plastics that people use. Most of the stuff is going to be food grade, should be food grade, and in the UK, equipment would be marked with a little symbol, a cup and fork symbol saying this is food grade plastic. If it's not, then we don't know whether chemicals are leaching out of the plastic and into the food product.

Now, I think the risks associated with this with honey are pretty small. Most of us have a very small dose of honey, dose is probably not a good word, but amount of honey at a time each day. If you eat something that's got a little bit of something in it, and you're not eating very much of the substance, you're getting even less of the material. It's that kind of thing that you have to be thinking about, what's the contaminants, not just in the room, but in the equipment that you're using, making sure the equipment is up to standard and good to use.

Those are some of the things I'm worried about. Certainly, pesticides and miticides are concerns as well. I know you have rules about what miticides can be used, so do we. I think you have one or two more miticides to used that we're allowed to. There was an incident a few years ago where somebody had, I think it was a European foulbrood disease, and he bought a antibiotic oxytetracycline through the internet and dosed his bees with it. This left a residue and he got prosecuted. This is the kind of thing that beekeepers really need to be aware of.

Jeff: Absolutely, whatever you put in the hive, potentially contaminate the honey and that's a big concern. I remember back in the days where you could get tetracycline over at the feed store. The rule was just sprinkle some across the top of the frames and get your dose. Beekeepers being beekeepers saying, "Well, if 1 tablespoon is good, 3 tablespoons is going to be better." That just led to all sorts of problems.

Andy: I saw a video a DB program produced where it wasn't explained what was going on, but I think you just explained it, Jeff. They had a bucket with a white powder, and they got the hive tools, and they were going, sprinkle, sprinkle. "Yes, a bit more, a bit more." That's it, totally, back on to the next slide. I suspected that was what was going on, but there was no explanation as part of the video. That is exactly the kind of thing that, in the UK, if we use a miticide, it's a product, it's in a packet, it's made for bees.

In the old days, we used to have old days, we used to use stuff called paradichlorobenzene, PDP, against the wax moths . That was found to leach into honey or into the wax, and then into the honey. There's never been a clear, thou shalt not use it, but it's stopped being used because simply of publicity.

Jeff: In the States, that's supposed to be off for-- your equipment's supposed to air out for several days. They don't tell you how long air out after using that moth. That's available, Becky, in the PB?

Becky: I'll be very honest with you, I know it used to be used at the university a long time ago, and it has not been for decades.

Jeff: I might be thinking something different.

Becky: I don't know because it's not legal or it just was they moved on.

Andy: We would air it out for several days, but it's still-- the thing is that it dissolves into the wax, it's absorbed into the wax. Once it's in the wax, it's very difficult to get out.

Jeff: That is the good thing and the bad thing about the wax, it does absorb everything. As the queen breeders would tell you, anything that has been brought into the hive will eventually get to the bees, perhaps, and weaken the queens if the queen is on old wax. Anyways, that's a different topic. The food safety, so it goes beyond the chemicals, as we just ended on, but really, you're looking at how is the condition of the equipment that is being used to extract honey, the extractor, the metals, the welding, the age of the equipment, I suppose, how it's sitting there and open to the air and not open to the air.

Andy: Yes. When I store stuff, it's very seasonal, isn't it? You get your honey crop off, and you extract, and then you put your piece away, and it may not be used again for a number of months. I always wash things before I use them because they could have got stuff on them. Then I wash them afterwards because you don't want to put things away dirty, and sticky, and so on. I will wrap things up very carefully with large plastic bags, polythene bags, wrap things up and close them up, and try and keep them as clean as they possibly can be during storage.

The difficult thing is supers, where do you store your supers? Most people have them in a big pile in the corner of a shed. To be honest with you, I think that's fine as long as you don't have mice.

Jeff: Oh, there are moths.

Becky: Paradichlorobenzene is sold under [unintelligible 00:19:41].

Jeff: I thought I saw it at a shop somewhere.

Becky: Andy, are you worried? I'm always worried about this, about beekeepers extracting honey from the brood nest. They have a hive that died over the winter, and they see these frames, but they're in the brood nest area, meaning they're close to pollen, close potentially to any kind of miticides use. I always suggest that they do not extract from the brood nest, but do you share the same concern?

Andy: I don't think there's a particular reason why not, I'd be uncomfortable with it. Certainly you'd want to factor in what miticides were used. We obviously extract from supers and most of the miticides say they shouldn't be used while the supers are in place. If you are extracting honey that has been exposed to miticides, I think that's a definite no-no. Actual dirt from the old brood frames, I suspect is not terribly consequential. Again, it's going to depend a bit on the brood frames themselves. I know some people keep the brood frames for quite a number of years and there could have been quite an accumulation in that one.

If it was brood frames that were new this year, then the chemicals and and so on would be so great. As I said, I can't think there's a particular reason why you shouldn't, but I'm uncomfortable with it, certainly selling it for human consumption.

Becky: I think the guilty culprit is pollen, unfortunately, contaminated pollen because I think studies showed regardless of where they're foraging in agricultural or urban areas. Unfortunately our girls are bringing home- in the US, they're bringing home an awful lot of pollen that's contaminated. It's stored in the cells and even if it's not there and honey's put in there, it's binding to the wax.

Andy: What are you thinking of? Neonocotinoids here or other products?

Becky: I'm worried about DDT at this point. No, I'm worried about there are such a variety, not just our miticides, but what's contaminated. The pollen that makes it into the nest, that's my concern.

Andy: I've not honestly given that any particular thought, but certainly neonicotinoids have residues in pollen and I'm always fairly dismissive of herbicides. Of course, herbicides will get onto plants, they will get into the plants, and now we're concerned about roundup as being carcinogenic. Now again, the dose you would get would be extremely tiny, but it would be there. Laboratory analysis can detect things down to parts per billion these days, so extraordinary sensitivity. It could be detected. Now whether it's significant or not, I don't know.

Jeff: You mentioned using equipment that is food safety rated or food safety, especially the plastics. When beekeepers store their honey, they extract it and they don't expect to sell it right away and they get their big pals of honey. What are considerations that they should keep in mind for honey storage?

Andy: The biggest concern, the most obvious concern is deterioration with age. The one that everybody gets hung up in the UK is HMF or HydroxyMethylFurfuraldehyde, HydroxyMethylFurfuraldehyde a generation of HMF, because the sugars react with the acidic honey and produce this stuff. Now HMF itself is completely harmless, but it's used in the UK as a measure of quality and there are rules in regulations about the amount of HMF that can be present. It's also one of those things that you would need a laboratory to test for. I can't go " Well, I can send it off" or I can do some little tests like a refractometer and go, "Yes, the HMF is fine."

The only way I can be confident is to store it carefully somewhere cool because the temperature, the generation of HMF is dependent on temperature. The higher the temperature, the temperature the higher HMF. I personally think HMF is a bit of a red herring, because our regulations also require that the diastase or the enzymes aren't affected too much and they degrade much quicker than the HMF is generated. Again, keeping it cool and not keeping it for too long will protect you against that. The other thing I I'm always concerned about with storage is the water content. We put it in plastic buckets and they should seal totally, completely, but it's best if you can keep it in a cool, dry place.

When I put the bucket lids on, they have clips all the way around, they clip them all down. I'll actually wrap it around with a bit of cling film or something like that to double seal it to protect it to stop moisture getting in, because of course moisture, honey is absorbent, it's hydroscopic. It will absorb moisture from the air and if it gets to a certain level, it will ferment. That obviously then devalues it enormously and you don't want that to happen. Then when you're storing your plastic buckets, I think rodents could chew their way into plastic buckets very easily. If you've got rats or mice or-

Becky: Oh, no.

Jeff: That would be a mess.

Andy: -or if there's other critters that you probably have in the US and we don't have, then you want to be a bit careful about where you store it.

Jeff: The mice and rats are enough. Nothing would be worse than opening up a bucket of honey and finding a mouse floating in it. That would just--

Becky: Oh.

Andy: I had an apiary once, which was in a shed. We kept bees actually inside the shed. We were feeding the bees in the winter and we had a a jerry can of sugar syrup and we knew that there were rats about, and the rats detected the sugar syrup, got on top of the Jerry can, chewed their way in, fell into the jerry can-

Becky: Oh, no.

Andy: -and drowned in syrup. Well, we got our own back with three dead rats

Becky: Wait. Three dead rats?

Andy: Three dead rats, yes. Three of them fell in and couldn't get out again.

Jeff: Oh, my gosh.

Andy: We did solve the rat problem.

Becky: You did take care of that. I thought rats were really good swimmers.

Andy: Well, they're good swimmers, but they tire. The Jerry can was half full when they fell in

Becky: They're not good climbers.

Andy: They're also in syrup. It's viscous stuff isn't it? It's very sticky.

Becky: Oh, my gosh.

Jeff: Well, let's take this opportunity-- What's that?

Becky: To change the subject?

Jeff: Yes, let's change the subject. Let's take this opportunity to take a quick break and hear from our sponsors.

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Becky: Okay. New topic, Andy, Jeff and I were talking a little bit prior to you joining us, but I think when it comes to how you take care of your honey, how you extract it and the protections that you implement into your program, I think it makes sense even if you don't have a program that's going to inspect your area or that's going to give you a lot of guidance to pretend like you do. For example, your book gives a lot of good information about protecting the honey and making sure that you've got a clean product. Could you talk a little bit about why beekeepers, even if they're not being watched, why they should act like they're being watched?

Andy: You want your product to be as good quality as possible. You want your customers to go away happy, and you particulary want them to come back afterwards. If you have honey that is fermenting or it's got visible dirt in it, then they're not going to come back. That honey is rubbish. It's very poor quality. I saw some for sale recently and I looked at it and went, "I'm not going to touch that." Can I tell you an embarrassing story?

Becky: Yes, you may. [laughs]

Andy: It's an embarrassing story. Charlie was a very good customer. Charlie lived a few 100 yards from where I lived, and Charlie came up every month with some £36 in his hand and he left with with 6 jars of honey, and I had £36 in my back pocket. Everything was lovely. This happened for quite a long time. One month Charlie turned up and he didn't have £36 in his hand. He had six jars of honey that he was bringing back to me. He said to me, "Look at these. They have got rust in them." He was looking in the honey and he could see the brown specs. Now as beekeepers, you and I will know that this is propolis, and it is harmless and this is because I hadn't used such a fine strainer when I'd use the honey- I extract it, I'll strain the honey. Some little bits of propolis had gone through. Charlie thought the propolis was rust and he was not going to eat rusty honey. I had to give Charlie £36 and Charlie was never seen again. This is a little story that I tell when I do talks and people go, "Oh, yes."

Becky: It's all about you bottle your honey and then you have to give it another check, don't you? You just want to make sure that-- Especially because honey is such a beautiful product that you also don't want to sell it with your fingerprints on it. There's something about doing that final inspection.

Andy: You have to keep your eyes open all the way through the process. If you do find something wrong and I learned from that experience, I now always put it through the fine strainer. I always use the fine strainer. I haven't had that problem since. Sometimes, I used to have a friend who, he had some little labels printed and he put on it, this honey has been produced using traditional bottling techniques. Don't expect it to be as pure as stuff you get out of a supermarket, because I'm working at home, as most many of us are certainly, and we haven't got the facilities to pressure strain it and so on. We don't want to either. He had those printed. I suspect in his case, it probably covered quite a lot of bad practice as well.

Jeff: Well, I've heard some beekeeper, someone told me once, people don't mind seeing a couple of bee legs in there. I always thought, I don't think customers want to see bits and parts of bees in their honey.

Andy: I did a talk at the National Honey Show last year. One of the things when you do talk, you get into conversation with the audience, anyway the attendees. There is one of them was saying, "We've got somebody who doesn't strain his honey at all. He sells it as it comes out of the extractor." It's got bee legs, bee wings, wax debris, all sorts of stuff. He doesn't strain it at all. His customers love it.

Becky: I have had people ask when I've manned the State Fair Honeybooth, what honey is the most raw? You have this picture in your head. You mean the one with the wax legs and the bee legs? But there is that desire, I think, where people wanted as close to the product as possible.

Jeff: It's when you direct them to the comb honey, right?

Becky: There you go.

Andy: Honeycomb is the answer to that one. You haven't even got it out of the packaging, out of the natural packaging is the thing. We have had a discussion about raw honey in the UK. I was selling at a church a while ago and somebody kept, well, I want some honey. Is it raw honey? I had to say to her, what do you mean by raw honey? We don't have a definition. Well, it hasn't been cooked, which is the other side, but that's a different story.

Jeff: Before the break, we were talking about equipment. If someone's setting up more of a permanent honey house or honey extracting area and it doesn't necessarily need to be a commercial size area, but just a corner of their basement that they're setting up for extracting honey. What are some considerations they should take into play?

Andy: The thing that we would require in the UK, everything has to be easy to clean. The ceiling needs to be plastered or covered with some sheeting material. I say sheeting, rigid sheeting. It can be dusted down and cleaned off. The walls should be readily cleansable. Probably plaster or timberboarding, but painted. The floor needs to be easy to clean. If you've ever done the extracting, as I'm sure you have, you get those little bits of wax that fall on the floor, then you tread on them, and then you've got honey and wax on your feet and it gets trodden through the house. You need to have a floor that's easy to clean. Your work surfaces need to be easy to clean.

My honey house has got formica work surfaces, rolltop work surfaces. If you're going to it in a big scale, then stainless steel and have it to a commercial standard. You need to have a wash face. In some way, wash your hands. Again, when you're extracting honey, your hands are always sticky and you're changing. Somewhere, you can wash your hands. You need to have sinks, adequate-sized sinks to wash equipment in. When I did my honey house, I bought quite a small sink and I'm regretting that I didn't get a bigger sink in it, because washing the extractor, I'll put the water in the extractor, wash it round, strain it out.

Then the cage from the extractor, well, mine comes to pieces, and I have to put one corner or one edge of it in and wash that and then spin it round a bit and wash the next bit and then spin it round the next and wash the next bit. Honey buckets, one honey bucket will fit in it and you can give it a good wash, the next one, the next one, the next one. Work surfaces areas that you can dry stuff. One of my foibles is I haven't got enough space for drying equipment. If you're washing a lot of jars, then they're going to take a lot of space to dry or a lot of buckets. They can take a lot of space to dry. What I've got is a series of trays that I can put things into and then I can move them away and have another one.

Adequate space, adequate lighting, hot and cold water. Our regulations require the water, the word is potable drinking water quality. For those of us who live in towns, that's not a problem. I have a cousin in the States, she has a borehole. What treatment does her borehole have? In the UK, we have people with boreholes, we have a variety of private water suppliers, and they need to be up to a standard. That's the proper standard.

Outside the food room, our regulations require there's a toilet somewhere nearby. You can go to the loo, and beside the toilet there should be a wash space. Again, that's so you can wash your hands after you've been to the loo. It's a really, really important food safety step. Getting your hands clean afterwards and before you handle food, that's absolutely critical. Off the top of my head, that's probably it, but I'll probably left a whole pile out.

Jeff: I'm glad you did, because I think I only hit about two of those.

Becky: Oh, no.

[laughter]

Jeff: If any more, I was just going to start-- I don't know.

[laughter]

Becky: Back to the drawing board there.

Jeff: Back to the drawing board. Should've talked to you before I built that honey house.

Andy: Well, that's a piece of the pie . In the UK, if you think I am going to build myself a honey house, then a really good thing to do would be to contact the local authority and say to them, look, I'm a beekeeper. I'm going to do this. These are my proposals. The Environmental Health team will be very happy to come down, certainly talk to you on the phone, talk through things, talk your proposals through. Tell you, "Yes, that's good." I like that, or "No, you need to do that. You need to improve that." Now, they're not experts in honey, but they are experts in food and food production, so they know what's required across other commercial premises.

You can have a dialog with them, that won't work for honey. I need to do something different for honey or do I need to do that? It doesn't work for honey. One of the things to bear in mind though, this is a business. Business models change. You start off as a beekeeper and you think, oh, lovely. I got a couple of hives and I'll just give the honey away to my friends for Christmas. Then you discover that next year, your hives have suddenly become four and you've got honey that you're going to sell. Next year, you've got six and it's becoming quite a problem with eight and 10 and so on.

Then one day, you have this great idea, why don't I make honey mustard? I've got some poor-quality honey that's got too high water content or something like that, that I could use it as an ingredient in something else. Beekeepers then become effectively more complicated food producers. Well, hang on a second. You've just completely changed the game from being I'm a beekeeper to I am now producing a commercial product. Honey mustard particularly, would be a tricky one, because mustard is one of the allergens. Now you have to worry about the allergen and labeling it as being an allergen. Then the other thing you have to worry about is durability.

Now, on honey, I have seen research that says something 18 months to two years is a reasonable period of time from extraction for durability best before date. Honey mustard, how do you know what's going to go wrong with that? How do you know whether it's going to keep for three months or six months or six months or a year? How do you know if you've got to keep it in the fridge? That becomes a much more complicated thing. This is one of the things that I've built into the book.

If they're planning a second edition and I want to build on this in the second edition, because I'm not sure I covered it as thoroughly as I might have done. When you start to produce foods other than honey, then the legislative ball changes, the legal requirements change and life becomes more complicated.

Jeff: That's a good point, because a lot of beekeepers like to get into the making of-- We haven't talked about wax and other hive products yet, lipsticks and other creams and other products. I never seen a discussion about sanitation practices, cleanliness, and producing those types of products.

Andy: The person to speak to, there is a lady called Sara Robb, Dr. Sara Robb. She's the UK expert on hive products involving wax. She makes the hand creams and the lip balms and that kind of thing. In the UK, the legal requirements are very, very stringent indeed. The standards are higher than they are for food safety. When you're producing things like lip balms, you may be using caustic chemicals, soda, caustic soda as a way of emulsifying it. You have to be very careful with what you're using. The oils and so on, they're all, you need to know what's in them. I don't deal with that very deliberately in the book.

[laughter]

Andy: There are one or two things I deal with, but it's a completely different topic, the safety and the production of pharmaceuticals or cosmetics with wax and other products like that. It is actually very complicated and Sara would be a really good person to speak to.

Becky: For example, like in Minnesota, if I decide I want to make hot honey or put cinnamon in the honey, then I've definitely, as you described, crossed that line. I think you just made a lot of beekeepers nervous who are making their own creams, because I don't know that I've ever seen anything regulated.

Andy: Again, this is something that people haven't thought about. The cinnamon honey and the nutmeg honey and the garlic honey and all of that, we see discussions about that in the UK in Facebook-type discussions. People sell products that are honey with cinnamon or cinnamon honey. To my mind, what the UK honey regulations say is that honey mustn't have any artificial flavors and it mustn't have any ingredients. The moment you put something in it, you can't sell it as cinnamon honey. You could sell it as honey with cinnamon. People go, well, what's the difference? There is a difference.

Then the other point of that is you've just got outside the honey-only label and you're now producing something with a flavor with an ingredient. That's a threshold in English law where honey is a prime product. They call it a prime product. Straight out of the hive, you don't need to register. The moment you put the ingredient into it, it ceases being a prime product and you need to register and the full food safety gamut kicks in. Doing that changes the ballgame quite significantly. I know I make some beekeepers very uncomfortable.

Becky: It's good to know, though.

Andy: I first wrote that article right back in 2009. Shall we say the response to it wasn't very positive? We had a number of letters, oh, I don't have to worry about this stuff. I'm a beekeeper. I've been told I don't have to worry about this stuff. You've been given out-of-date information or you're using information that is now out-of-date. The reason I did this and I'm still doing it is because people don't know what the purpose of this is to educate and tell people. In the UK, it's unlikely to get prosecuted unless something really bad went wrong.

We have other tools that we can play with, more than the enforcement people can play with. They have things like improvement notices and prohibition notices. If you're doing something that's really bad, they can say, stop. If the offence is not to stop, or they can say, you must improve this process, and so on. Now, in the States, you're very famous for being litigious.

[laughter]

Andy: You could get sued, is that right?

Jeff: I've heard it said.

Andy: Well, am I right?

Becky: I would answer you, but I'd have to talk to my lawyer first, Andy.

[laughter]

Andy: You could be in the situation where you as a beekeeper have produced a product that has got an allergen in it, and you haven't done the labeling because the labeling, you didn't know you needed to do the labeling, and you haven't thought, oh, it's got an allergen in it, and somebody eats it and is badly affected or even dies. This has happened not with honey, but regularly in the media in the UK, we have stories about people. They reckon one person in 20 has an allergen, a food allergen. You produce something, you sell it in all innocence, and somebody is badly affected by it. They track it down to the honey, and they come knocking at your door saying I was badly affected. This isn't a good scenario, and so you need to know what's going on, which is what the purpose of the book is.

Jeff: There's a lot more here than I was expecting, and we hadn't even talked about other hive products, such as, well, we touched on wax, but pollen and propolis. We'll have to have you back at another time to discuss that. Maybe, I don't know, Becky, I think I'm just going to put a big closed sign on my honey house door.

[laughter]

Andy: Well, what I really don't want to do is discourage people. Beekeeping is a valuable activity. It's environmentally useful. I'm a hobbyist. I don't know where you are. I have a lot of fun out of it. I've made some very good friends. I can do a lot of environmental education with it. We go to shows and so on. We talk about bees, but then we talk about the environment. We talk about pesticides. We talk about other species of bees. You've got 2,000 species of bees in America, apparently, apart from honeybees. When people say, I know bees are in trouble, you can say, well, honeybees are fine, but actually we need to worry about the others. This is what we can do.

It's a valuable activity, and I don't want to, and some people, the money is important to them. They sell the honey, and it's a useful source of income to them. What people need to do is to be aware of what's required, and do what they can to improve and comply with it and meet the standards. I don't know what the standards are in the USA, so I've been talking about English standards. They may be different, and I don't know about enforcement in the USA and how that works, but I would certainly never say to anybody, don't stop doing it. I would say is be aware and work on improving if you need to.

If your kitchen's a mess, have a tidy up before you get it dirty. I have been to houses where I'm going, yes, I wouldn't want to eat any out of this place. I know people who I go, I don't want to eat his food, but then most of us are absolutely fine.

Becky: I think instead of a closed sign, Jeff, I think you need a proceed with caution sign, that you cautiously extract and bottle.

Jeff: No, I'm just actually just teasing. It's very clean.

Becky: I know, you've got a place. I'm sure it's fine. Andy, to your point, it's different across our country. We can't talk about what the regulations are in the US, because each state has different or no regulations or minimal regulations.

Jeff: Sometimes counties, different counties.

Becky: You're right. Sometimes it could be at a more local level. We're not going to do that episode because that would be impossible. It's just good general advice.

Jeff: Yes, the important part is if you're producing or packaging honey, you're going to start doing it more and more to look into the local regulations, talk to other beekeepers and find out what's required and do some research online. Google is a powerful tool.

Andy: Well, it's just research online, something like Facebook or something like that, that will put you in contact with the local beekeepers. Now, my experience of advice that I've seen on Facebook is that it's often not right or is very confused. In the UK, we have an expression, ask three beekeepers, get four opinions. Well, on Facebook, it's ask three beekeepers get 53 opinions. You'll get lots and lots of conflicting answers, but it will give you contact starting point, the local community, the local beekeeping community. You can start asking those questions.

Who do I turn to? Who does the food enforcement around here? If you don't know, and I've got no idea how it works in the USA. In the UK, it's my local authority. The people I pay my rates to are the people who do the food safety enforcement. If you don't know, then there'll be a food shop somewhere near you. You go in there and say, who does your food enforcement? How can I contact them? After they've gone, why, what have we done wrong? Oh, no, I just want to find out.

[laughter]

Andy: Then I'm sure they'll be saying, yes, you phone up for Utah City Council or not so Utah City Council, we'll have City Council where my cousin lives or whatever. Certainly in the UK, food safety people are more concerned about safety than the enforcement side behind you doing things wrong, giving a price.

Jeff: Well, Andy, we've come to the end of our time and we've really enjoyed the conversation with you this afternoon. I know that you've provided a wealth of information for our listeners that in our seven years of doing this podcast, this is the first time we've actually talked about food safety. Yes, that's shameful in some ways, but I'm glad that we saved it until now when we can talk with you, Andy. I'd like to invite you back at a later date. We can pick up on some other items. If anybody wants to find out anything more Andy's book is called Food Safety for Beekeepers - Advice on legal requirements and practical actions. The show notes will have the links to it. I'm sure it's on Amazon or one of our sponsors, Northern Bee Books. Andy, thank you for staying up late to talk to us.

Becky: Oh, yes. Thank you, Andy.

Andy: Well, it's not that late.

[laughter]

Becky: It would be for me. I would be asleep.

Andy: Yes, probably up until nine o'clock in the evening. I better pour myself a beer and tell you to have a pleasant evening now. Thank you so much for inviting me. I've really enjoyed it, and I hope that it's inspired and informed and not discourage, but maybe encourage people and putting people going the right direction. It's seven years of not having somebody on food safety. I'm the only person I know who does food safety on these. You found me now.

Becky: Fantastic.

[music]

Jeff: Hey, Becky, I've gone here to my extractor scrubbing it out. You want to close the show for me?

Becky: You could've waited, right? Five more minutes. You really had to get there.

[laughter]

Jeff: Made me nervous talking to Andy. What a treat it was talking with him.

Becky: Oh, she's so lovely though. He's such a friendly help in your honey house. I do think the spirit of it is definitely there, it's just let's do our best. Let's learn from other people's mistakes and let's try to keep that product clean. Let's try to stay in everybody's good favor if you sell them honey.

Jeff: Use a fine strainer.

Becky: I'll bottle honey and then if it doesn't pass inspection, if there is a little speck, I'll pull it out. That's just goes into our supply.

Jeff: It's a great conversation. I think if you're selling honey or even giving it away. Honey has such a wholesome image, and the purity of honey shouldn't be questioned. That's why we as beekeepers need to be really proactively protecting that image of quality and purity for honey and sell it that way and make sure our operations create it that way.

Becky: That's well said. It's interesting, because one of the things so many beekeepers do is they enter their honey in honey shows. Honey shows have so many of these high standards. They're not in your kitchen or your honey house watching you extract in bottle, but it is the product that they're taking a look at. It's connecting the practical information that Andy shared with us to that final product that is honey-show-worthy.

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcast, wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage. We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, BetterBee, Global Patties, Strong Microbials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today podcast listener for joining us on this show.

Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the leave a comments section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[00:53:33] [END OF AUDIO]