Honey is sweet, healthy, nearly immortal - & endangered

Bees will produce honey as long as they have a place to store it and as long as they have nectar sources, said Suzanne Matlock, of the Beekeepers Guild. Bees store the honey in their hives and seal it with wax when they are satisfied with its quality.

When the honeycombs and frames are filled, "we 'steal' the excess, and we leave the rest for them [for the winter]," Matlock said.

Using centrifugal force, beekeepers extract honey from the frames with hand-cranked or mechanical devices. Once the wax seal is broken, the honey flows from the combs into a barrel, then out of a spigot, through a series of increasingly finer screens, and into then jars.

"Each frame holds about three to four pounds of honey; there are about about three to four jars of honey in each frame," Matlock said, noting that a typical box holds about 40 pounds of honey.

Some in the industry disagree about how much uniform honey standards, as proposed by Schumer, will help. Jim Bobb, a Montgomery County apiarist, said that large producers such as Dutch Gold, of Lancaster, and Sue Bee, of Sioux City, Iowa, account for the overwhelming majority of mass-produced honey, such as what you find in supermarkets and in products such as honey graham crackers. Such companies are pushing hard for "purity" standards.

Folks like Bobb, who have small to midsized businesses "geared toward a smaller scale," worry more about such surburban and urban problems as lawn chemicals and pesticides.

"We are more concerned that the honey is as natural as possible," said Bobb, who has hives, among other locations, at the Morris Arboretum in the city and Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square. "Suburbia has more pesticides than you realize."

Juday agreed. "Even the so-called organic things that people use, they're nonselective," she said. "They'll kill every bug that comes into contact with them." *

Deborah Woodell, a Daily News sports copy editor, blogs about honey at

latinwordforhoney.blogspot.com.