DO WE KNOW WHAT KIND OF HONEY WE ARE EATING?
Dear media representative,
Dear rescuers of bees and of real honey,
World Bee Day is celebrated on May 20th and we celebrate it in the most difficult time for beekeeping in this century.
The European honey market is flooded with counterfeits (from 46% to 88%, depending on the country), consumers have less and less opportunities to buy real honey, and beekeepers have less and less opportunities to sell the obtained bee products due to unfair competition from the fakes.
In some regions, beekeepers are already abandoning beekeeping en masse due to the unbearable financial situation. We fear that this will become a general trend if the current situation does not change urgently. Beekeepers giving up beekeeping leads to incalculable damage to yields in agriculture, because there are no bees without beekeepers! Due to climate change, bees cannot survive on their own.
The beekeepers of Europe recently founded the European Beekeeping Association with the main goal of fighting against counterfeit honey.
We believe that we all must urgently work together to remove counterfeit honey from the market. Honey consumers must be provided with real bee honey, with all the benefits it brings for the vitality and health of people. Counterfeits are only sugar and nothing else, or, even worse, they can contain substances that are harmful to your health.
We ask that you, the media, be our greatest help in this action.
We are sending you a short promotional video of 18 seconds (https://ebaeurope.eu/promotional-video-for-download/) with the message that European honey is the best for Europeans, in order to support European beekeepers and force counterfeiters to back down. Please publish this video on your channels and thus help honey consumers, bees and beekeepers.
Attached is a text on why Europeans should choose European honey for consumption (www.ebaeurope.eu/europeans-choose-european-honey), as well as a statement from the European Commission on imported honey (https://food.ec.europa.eu/safety/eu-agri-food-fraud-network/eu-coordinated-actions/honey-2021-2022_en), notions about the importance of bees for the planet, and a brief history of World Bee Day (HERE), for your own information and as background to the news you might write.
Thank you in advance for your support,
For 234,442 beekeepers of the European Beekeeping Association,
President of the European Beekeeping Association (EBA)
Boštjan Noč