By Blake Jackson
New research suggests that current U.S. organic honey regulations may be more restrictive than necessary, potentially creating opportunities for more continental beekeepers to enter the growing organic honey market.
“Consumers are willing to pay 20 to 30% more for organic certified honey than nonorganic certified honey,” said Scott McArt, associate professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a senior author of the new study, published July 29 in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
“If organic honey was possible to produce in the continental U.S., it would open up a huge market for our country’s beekeepers, who are really struggling right now.”
Current USDA organic certification requires beekeepers to maintain a 6.4-kilometer (about 4-mile) buffer of organic-certified or natural land around apiaries. Researchers argue that this requirement is difficult to meet across most of the continental United States, leaving only a few certified organic honey producers, primarily in Hawaii.
The research team managed bee colonies using organic practices on Northeastern farms surrounded by large areas of natural and semi-natural habitat. Their findings showed that the honey produced contained pesticide residue levels comparable to certified organic honey currently sold in the marketplace.
“Our research shows that beekeepers in the Northeast U.S. may only need a small fraction of that land to produce honey with pesticide contamination as low as imported USDA organic honeys,” said Ben DeMoras ’22, M.S. ’25, the study’s first author.
Researchers also tracked bee foraging behavior and found that bees typically travel about 750 meters from their hives, significantly less than the distance required under existing organic standards.
“This study demonstrates that it is possible to produce clean honey that could meet the standards for USDA organic certification in the continental U.S., even though the apiaries were placed in relatively small organic farms,” said Margarita López-Uribe, Ph.D. ‘14, associate professor of entomology at the Pennsylvania State University and a senior author of the study.
The findings could encourage federal agencies to reconsider current certification requirements, improving market access for U.S. beekeepers while supporting a stronger domestic organic honey industry.
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Categories: New York, Education, General