Kealakekua, Hawaii (June 15, 2011) – Big Island Bees’ organic Lehua & Cinnamon honey has been selected as a 2011 Silver Finalist for Outstanding New Product in the   sofi™ Awards from the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, Inc.  The sofi Awards recognize excellence in specialty foods and beverages and are a coveted industry honor. “sofi” stands for Specialty Outstanding Food Innovation.

The Lehua & Cinnamon honey was one of 125 SilverFinalists selected by a national panel of specialty food experts from a record 2,236 contenders across 33 Awards categories. Gold Winners will be announced in a red-carpet ceremony July 11, 2011 at the Summer Fancy Food Show in Washington, D.C. hosted by Celebrity Chef Cat Cora.

“We are thrilled that the judges picked our organic Lehua & Cinnamon honey,” said Whendi Grad, founder of Big Island Bees. “The combination of these two organic products from the Big Island seemed like a perfect match to us, and the judges seemed to agree”.  Big Island Bees’ products include organic Ohia-Lehua Blossom, organic Wilelaiki Blossom, and Macadamia Nut Blossom honeys, and are distributed throughout Hawaii, the U.S. West Coast, Canada, Japan, and China.

The sofi Awards are open to members of the NASFT, a not-for-profit trade association established in 1952 with more than 2,900 members throughout the U.S. and abroad. For more information on the NASFT and its Fancy Food Shows, go to www.specialtyfood.com and for complete coverage of the 2011 sofi Awards, visit foodspring.com/sofiawards.

“The field was the most competitive yet, with more than 2,326 entries across all

33 Awards. The innovation and quality of the finalists are a true testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of our members,” says Ann Daw, president of the NASFT.

We’ve been told informally that Big Island Bees honey is one of the most frequently confiscated items for travelers returning to the mainland from Hawaii.  And just today we received an email from a recent honeymooner checking on the cost of mailing replacements to Australia for her Wilelaiki blossom honey that wasn’t able to make the trip back with her.

Please remember that honey is considered a liquid subject to the TSA’s 3 ounce rule and, unless purchased at the airport, should be packed in checked luggage only.

Big Island Bees® Announces New Organic Hawaiian Lehua & Cinnamon Honey

KEALAKEKUA, Hawaii (October 2010)-

Big Island Bees announced that it has combined its celebrated organic, white Lehua honey with organic cinnamon grown on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Cinnamon’s flavor and putative health benefits have been popular for hundreds of years. The addition of organic cinnamon grown on the Big Island with organic white, crystallized Lehua honey is a marvelous combination of Big Island crops, as the spicy taste and fragrant nose of the cinnamon provides balance to the mild and gentle sweetness of the Lehua.

The Lehua blossom, from which the honey is produced, is indigenous to Hawaii and is the inspiration for an ancient Hawaiian legend of love and fidelity.

Big Island Bees is part of a family business that has been producing honey in Hawaii for almost 40 years. It takes great pride in not heating, filtering or blending its honeys, so as to produce intense single floral flavors. Its honey is distributed on the U.S. West Coast, Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Japan, and is carried by a variety of specialty stores and high-end grocers, including Whole Foods. For more information please visit www.bigislandbees.com.

The state of Hawaii initiated a quality control program in 2006 to help consumers distinguish genuine Hawaiian products from look-alike products that have only partial Hawaiian content or are processed in a significant way outside of Hawaii. This was accomplished by allowing qualified products to bear the “Hawaii Seal of Quality” on a distinctive green and white sticker affixed to the product packaging.

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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.