I'll confess straightaway that an alternative, apple-based honey is unlikely to rouse either ire or excitement in me. But I do see the opportunity to talk a bit about bees and their place in the world, naturally and agriculturally.
Some fun facts about bees:
90% of bees are solitary bees. These cat ladies of the insect world burrow into the ground, dead tree trunks, and hollow twigs hidden by homemade leaf camouflage (in the case of the leafcutter bee), creating a space to live out their days all alone. Some of these bees build solitary nests near each other, but rarely interact, and are still considered solitary. (Like people living the good life in a cul-de-sac.)
Solitary bees do not have a queen, produce little to no honey, and don't produce wax. They do not swarm, and in fact are not aggressive at all. They also lack a pollen basket, which means that they are actually much more efficient pollinators than honey bees.
In other words, 90% of bees defy the common archetype of the bee in many significant ways.
Honey is not made from pollen. Perhaps you already knew that, but many people don't. Honey is made from nectar, which is the sugar water plants make to attract pollinators. Pollinating insects, like honey bees, gather this sugar water and jam it into their crop, or honey stomach. Enzymatic action takes over, just like it does when we swallow anything. A forager bee with a full crop returns to home base (the hive) and promplty vomits. I don't say this to be crass--this is quite literally what happens. A house bee then takes this proto-honey and continues ingesting and vomiting it for something like 20 minutes. At that point, the house bee stores the product in a cell inside the hive. He proudly beats his wings a lot, too, so the honey dries out faster. After it's sufficiently dry, a wax seal goes over the honey to store it for the long haul.
Stinging. Honey bees die after they sting. They are fearless in service to their hive. Solitary bees do not die upon stinging, but they are also loners, with no reason to sacrifice themselves when they could just move on--they're much less likely to sting. A bumblebee does not have a barbed stinger like a honey bee, and can sting you like a maniac without fear of de-gutting herself. That said, she probably won't, unless you wander near her home and don't leave. A wasp will definitely sting you, but...
A wasp is not a bee. While they evolved from the same taxonomic order, wasps and bees are only cousins now. The bee decided to go the way of the gatherer, the wasp the way of the hunter. Bees are herbivores, wasps will come for your picnic. (Unless you count licking sweat as carnivorous, then sweat bees don't make the herbivore cut.)
There are approximately 4,000 species of bees in the United States. Most of them are natives, while the honey bee is an import.
Most bees live from three to six weeks. There are exceptions: carpenter bees can live up to two years, and queen bees live about a year.
So, now, about Bee Free Honee:
"So what's the point of the fake honey!?" ask dozens of people.
1) Well, it does taste good. Sometimes a new variety of a familiar product doesn't need much justification to exist. Sorghum beer? Coconut butter? Flax oil? We can take or leave them, but each offers a unique taste/texture/nutrient combination, so calling them "fake" is weird. (Except in the case of sorghum beer, which is disgusting.) Perhaps Bee Free is opening themselves to criticism by calling their product "honey." It's hard to imagine people rolling their eyes at apple butter or pear jelly. Again, I don't have any special love or loathing for what's essentially a viscous apple jelly.
2) All is not well in the land of bees. Sure, an individual beekeeper doesn't hurt bees. But it's important to understand that an individual local beekeeper selling her honey at the farmer's market has as much to do with the industrial scale migratory beekeeping as your local butcher does with Tyson Brands. The migratory beekeeping industry is facing many unforeseen problems—the sort that crop up when you deal with astronomical numbers. As that link from Scientific American will tell you, each of the 90 million almond trees in California's almond acreage needs help from bees to fully flower. That demand is beyond the reach of local bees by many orders of magnitude, so about 31 billion bees are imported into California each almond season. These bees are brought on trucks from across the country to
Because demand is so high, the bees do not get a chance to hibernate. Their health suffers, and many of them die—many more than in ages past. Many beekeepers lose half of their bees each winter. In fact, many sources have been claiming there is a full-on honey bee crisis happening, (though some claim* that this is not the case) and the agricultural implications are dire:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/honey-bee-crisis/
http://www.mainebee.com/articles/crisis.php
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130510-honeybee-bee-science-european-union-pesticides-colony-collapse-epa-science/
http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/sustainable-agriculture/save-the-bees/
*Think tanks with vested interests
