Frequently Asked Questions Transparency around our products has always been our philosophy

In our history we have twice run out of honey and even voluntarily deleted our products off supermarket shelves as a consequence of only using Australian honey.

We still keep hives and some of our honey comes from our own hives but we also source honey from across Australia from the very best of Australia’s honey producing families who we know, visit and trust. The majority of our honey comes from the East Coast of Australia.

Because we are free from most of the terrible pests and diseases that impact bees in other countries, Australia really is the bee utopia of the world.

Imported honey from certain counties also carries with it the risk of adulteration with cheap syrups and other unknown ingredients. We made a decision when the first Australian honey shortage hit back in 2004 to never import honey because without knowing if it is pure honey we couldn’t risk feeding it to our family, let alone anyone else’s.

We are fourth generation beekeepers ourselves and deeply understand just how important Australia’s beekeepers are to our future food security.

By law all honey sold in Australia must carry this symbol. You can check if the product you are looking at is 100% Australian produced or contains some imported honey. Our suggestion is to only use 100% Australian from a supplier you can trust. These products will either say Product of Australia or Made in Australia from 100% Australian Ingredients – both mean no imported honey is contained inside.

It is pure and natural, produced by bees gathering nectar from plants, stored in the beehive and allowed to fully ripen and mature by the bees in the hive. It complies fully to the definition of honey as per the Australian Food Standards Code and does not have anything added or removed to change its natural composition.

Our honey is pure and natural produced by bees gathering nectar from plants, storing in the beehive and allowed to fully ripen and mature by the bees in the hive. It complies fully to the definition of Honey as per the Australian Food Standards Code and does not have anything added or removed to change its natural composition.

Honey needs to be gently warmed to enable the honey to flow when being extracted from the frames and to strain out hive matter eg bees legs, beeswax etc. We do not pasteurise our honey except where it is a legal requirement to do so i.e. to send it into WA. Research shows when honey is heated for long periods of time (12 hrs) over 45 degrees the honey begins to deteriorate thus reducing the naturally occurring enzymes and the honey starts to darken in colour. Our warming system is thermostatically controlled so as to not allow the honey to get too warm.

Ultrafiltration is common in honey sold in places like some parts of the world where the honey is passed through a very fine filter and then a vacuum extraction process that strips the honey of virtually everything including tiny pollen grains, air bubbles, even colour and much of the good bits associated with natural honey. It’s done to prevent the honey from naturally crystallising and “polishes” the honey to give it a golden almost oil like sheen.

We simply pass the honey through very coarse filters that only take out unsightly lumps of beeswax and hive debris, the stuff you would be offended by if you found it on your toast! Most of our honey will eventually crystallise as a result of not being ultra filtered. This process ensures the natural pollens and enzymes stay in the honey.

We do not certify our honey through an organic certification process. We believe sourcing it from Australia’s clean / green environment and working with excellent ethical beekeepers keeps our product pure and natural.

Australia does not have many of the bee diseases in most other parts of the world, for this reason we do not need to use chemicals in our hives like other countries do to control these diseases. The Australian Government National Residue Survey conducted annually for more than 35 years demonstrates the purity of Australian produced honey and its absence of pesticides, antibiotics and other environmental chemicals.

We have never and would never add sugar or any related substance like sugar syrup to our honey. Our honey is 100% pure Australian honey, just like the bees make it.

Beekeepers regularly inspect their hives to see when the honeycomb can be removed. Honeycomb is removed from the hive and taken to be extracted. The wax cappings are removed with a sharp blade before the honeycomb is placed in to an extractor.Centrifugal force in the extractor throws the honey out of the frames. Nothing is done to it to turn it into honey. The frames, now empty of honey are placed back in the hives to be filled again by the bees. An incredibly efficient environmentally friendly process where nothing is wasted and nature happily accepts reuse!

We are quite choosy about the beekeepers we deal with, not every beekeeper or every lot of honey makes the grade! We make sure we understand their businesses and the way they treat their bees and hives. We inspect their sites, ask lots of questions about their practices and the honey they supply us, we randomly test their honey for a whole range of different measures just to make doubly sure and to satisfy our customers. We’ve got a simple mandate – we’d never feed honey to your family that we wouldn’t feed to ours. That way we’re happy that you can feel confident in feeding it to yours!

Honey can be adulterated in a number of ways and luckily the majority of Australian honey is pure 100% honey. However, Australia needs to be vigilant, so that consumers can be confident that they are eating real honey. We are working with the world’s leading international honey testing laboratories using the most advanced testing methods so that we continue to keep ahead of the fraudsters.

With regard to ensuring our honey is safe and free from environmental and chemical nasties, Beechworth Honey uses up to 30 different tests as part of our comprehensive Quality Assurance program. These tests ensure that our products comply with all consumer and regulatory requirements.

Beechworth Honey is third party audited and certified to the Global Food Standard – Grade A and is subject to unannounced food safety, quality and traceability audits by JASANZ accredited auditors, BSI or any of our major trading partners any day of the year.

Beechworth Honey only uses 100% Australian honey …always! We know exactly where our honey comes from, back to individual apiaries, geographic locations and botanical sources. We have a strong network of beekeepers with aligned values around the importance of a strong, ethical beekeeping industry that supplies 100% Australian honey.

Our other Beauty products contain some ingredients that, although are not palm oil, are derived from palm ingredients. These include:

Ceteareth 20
Cetearyl Alcohol
Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside
Sodium Lauroyl Sarcosinate
Sodium Lauroamphoacetate
Sodium Chloride
Sodium Cocoyl Glutamate
Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride

We are working with our supplier towards removing these ingredients from our range.

All suppliers of these palm derived ingredients sit on the RSPO (Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil), the international organisation that develops and implements global standards for sustainable palm oil. These suppliers have committed to produce, source and/or use sustainable palm oil certified by the RSPO.

For this reason our beekeepers work really hard to ensure they leave enough honey stores on the hive for the hive to eat. This is the primary job of the beekeeper to only take excess honey that the hive does not need. In periods of drought where there is a failure of the next honey crop it may be necessary for a beekeeper to prevent the hive from starving to death by supplementary feeding the hive with small amounts of sugar syrup. Beekeepers don’t like to do this, its inferior nutritionally, costly and time consuming and is only done as a last resort when mother nature lets us down! This syrup is fully consumed by the bees and does not make it into the next honey flow.

Rarely, if there has not been enough flowers or if a honey / nectar flow has failed due to poor weather and the bees have been highly active consuming their stores of honey, a beekeeper may find it necessary to supplementary feed their hives to ensure they don’t starve. They will use a sugar syrup simply made with dissolved white sugar and water but this is only fed in small quantities that the bees can consume and and not store. Bees are only fed in emergencies when there is not a nectar flow or honey crop. The bees consume the sugar syrup well before the next honey flow so it never ends up in our honey. Sugar is expensive and beekeepers first choice is to manage their bees environment so that they don’t have to supplementary feed. The diet of natural nectar is always the preferred option and better for the bees.

As part of our quality assurance system we regularly monitor the natural sugar composition of honey as this is required as part of the Australian food standards code and have never had any issues.

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Please give us a call on (02) 6033 2322 or email sales@beechworthhoney.com.au and we can reset your account

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