Ireland ‘losing golden opportunity to market heather honey’
Ireland is losing out on a golden agri-business opportunity, according to an internationally renowned bee expert who believes local heather honey should be sold and marketed similar to New Zealand’s world-renowned Manuka honey.
Unlike New Zealand, which has turned Manuka honey into a multi-million dollar international business, Irish honey, particularly heather honey, is neglected in terms of government support required to exploit what is a potentially hugely lucrative agribusiness.
Eye-wateringly expensive, Manuka honey is produced by bees who pollinate the flower Leptospermum scoparium, commonly known as the manuka bush. Manuka honey’s antibacterial properties sets it apart from traditional honey.
“Here in Ireland we don’t do a lot of honey production. Beekeeping is a kind of hobby here, so while there’s excellent heather and ivy honey being produced in Ireland, it is not being exploited as an agri-business,” explains Dr Fiona Murphy-Edwards, CEO of ApisProtect, a tech firm which uses cutting-edge agri-technology to monitor the strength of twenty million honey bees in Europe, North America, and South Africa.
“One huge opportunity we’re missing out on in Ireland is producing something the way Manuka honey is produced in New Zealand.”
While Irish honey generally is of an extremely high quality in terms of international standards, says Dr Murphy-Edwards, our heather honey has the same properties as Manuka honey.
“These properties are present in Irish heather honey, yet in New Zealand they’re selling Manuka honey for about $150 per kilo; in Ireland we’re selling our honey for as little as $5 per kilo.
“The only thing New Zealand is doing that we’re not doing is that they’re making an absolutely super job of marketing Manuka honey!
“They ensure that everyone knows about the health benefits of Manuka honey. They stringently protect the production of it and they have a certified process to ensure its quality. It’s treated like a super-premium product. You will often buy Manuka honey in a pharmacy for example.”
Dr Murphy-Edwards said that because of Ireland’s membership of the EU, farmers here must comply with stringent legislation around the use of pesticides and fungicides, which means that these chemicals don’t end up in our honey.
“It is a much better product than the honey we import from some other places in the world,” she declared, adding that honey from some parts of the world are exposed to pesticides in the environment.
“Beekeepers here should be supported and encouraged to achieve scaling-up of production and better marketing of their honey,” she said.
She believes Ireland could exploit this opportunity if the Government was prepared to invest in supporting the sector with high-tech agri technologys. Dr Edwards-Murphy called for a national organisation to be established to oversee the production and marketing of Irish honey, and in particular Irish heather honey, which she described as “a unique floral honey”.
“What we need is an excellent marketing plan, as well as the appropriate support to enable our honey producers to enable them to scale up.
“It can be difficult to keep bees in Ireland because it is very expensive and until people are aware of just how valuable our honey is, they will not be prepared to pay for the higher production costs involved in scaling up what is essentially a very skilled, high quality agribusiness sector.”
