No, we haven’t been reading the National Enquirer. Aliens are threatening production of the rare and marvelous Lehua honey extracted from Hawaii’s Ohia forests. However, these aliens are terrestrial, introduced to Hawaii from Brazil in 1825.

They are strawberry guava plants, an invasive species that has no natural predators or competitors in Hawaii, and which the U.S. Forest Service now believes is growing so aggressively that it is damaging Hawaii’s watersheds and replacing native forests. The Forest Service is promoting a plan to slow strawberry guava’s growth to allow native plants, such as the Ohia tree, to compete for space.

And the Forest Service’s plan? To introduce the insect Tectococcus Ovatus, or scale insect, also from Brazil, to feed on the strawberry guava and thereby reduce the number of seeds produced and slow the rate of the plant’s growth. Consider this Alien v. Predator II (or is that III?).

This plan has been studied for 15 years and the Forest Service is convinced the law of unintended consequences won’t operate once the scale insect has been released. Given the problems Hawaii has with invasive species, local residents aren’t convinced, and voiced their concerns at a recent meeting of the Hawaii County Council Committee on Public Works and Intergovernmental Relations.

The alternative to the Forest Service’s plan is to manually remove the strawberry guava, a grueling, time consuming, and expensive task, and one that is likely to be difficult to fund in a time of budget constraints.

You can learn more about this at the Hawaii Invasive Species Council link:

 http://www.hawaiiinvasivespecies.org/hisc/enews/20080716hiscenews19.htm

We’ve always thought that honey was healthier than granulated sugar or high fructose corn syrup, but wondered whether it was also better for the environment than other sweeteners. 

For purposes of this post, we decided to compare how much water is consumed in producing honey versus granulated sugar, and used as a reference the book “Sugar Water: Hawaii’s Plantation Ditches” by Carol Cox (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), and our own honey production records.

Here is the comparison:

It takes 500 gallons of water to produce one pound of sugar. And this doesn’t even include the amount of water required to irrigate the sugar cane. That is 5.3 gallons of water for each teaspoon of sugar.

For a typical honey flow in one of our apiaries, we use 600 gallons of water (yes, we have to supplement the water bees obtain from natural rainfall). But this 600 gallons of water produce approximately 8,000 pounds of honey, or 768,000 teaspoons. The amount of water per teaspoon is negligible. 

While certainly not a rigorous scientific test, the differences are dramatic enough to indicate that the production of honey does require significantly less amounts of precious clean water.

We’re still working on comparing  the relative amount of energy used to produce sugar and honey and will post this when we’ve completed our review.

Please let us know if you have any information on the amount of water and energy used to produce high fructose corn syrup.

On October 8th, the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded Big Island Bees an Export Achievement Award for its success in selling its pure and organic Hawaiian honey in various Asian markets. 

Over the past year, we have successfully introduced our organic Lehua Blossom, Macadamia Blossom, and organic Wilelaiki Blossom honeys into Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore.

We hope to identify distributors in other Asian countries over the next year. Please contact us if there are distributors in your location you suggest we contact.