Honey is a semi-liquid material. It is prepared by bees from the honeydew secreted by the nectaries located in the flowers of plants. The taste is sweet which is mainly due to glucose and the mono sugar fructose. Besides this, it has vitamins, minerals, and Amino acids which are very useful for our body. People are keeping bees for honey. It also comes under agriculture.
Consumption of honey has increased
This bee keeping is also called apiculture. And the place where the bees are kept is called a beehive or bee yard. In India, RN Mattoo was a pioneer worker in introducing beekeeping with the Indian Bee in the year 1930.
According to UN FAO data, the world’s beehive increased from about 50 million in 1961 to about 83 million in 2014. It equates to an average annual increase of about 13%. Due to the consumption of honey, many fake products have also come into the markets. Using fake products can be dangerous for health. Keeping this in mind, large packed consumer goods companies like Dabur, Baidnath, Brij honey, Kashmir honey, Patanjali have announced the formation of the Indian Honey Alliance (IHA).
According to a statement – ‘IHA has already started a dialogue with the central government and is working closely with consumers as well as scientific bodies to provide farmers and producers with modern, easy to use, affordable, and scalable technologies. IHA is promoting science-based quality standards to improve the existing practice of source, testing, packaging, etc for Indian honey.’
Recently CSE director-general Sunita Narayan from the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) told that sugar syrup is being adulterated tremendously in almost all the brands of honey sold in the Indian markets. She said that it is food fraud. She also said that in the time of Covid, overuse of sugar in food will make the situation worse.
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