We like to think that it is better than organic. We are not under the official organic supervision of the government.
Why not? We have seriously considered moving to the organic label, but the regulation for organic honey are a bit insane in our opinion. They focus on things that do not matter much to the quality of honey all the while neglecting things that do matter.
For instance, it is still allowed in in organic honey production to use styrofoam honey boxes for the hives. Only the overwintering boxes need to have natural materials on the inside. So organic does not consider the possible contamination of micro-plastics form the hive.
Another main reason is that organic requires to use organic sugar for winter feed. That makes no sense whatsoever, and indeed has questionable environmental side-effects. This forces organic beekeepers to import sugar from overseas (mostly Brazil), because there is no organic sugar producer in Finland. That is questionable on environmental grounds, if nothing else. It also needlessly increases production costs a lot.
Furthermore, it does not make the slightest difference to the honey what kind of sugar is fed to the bees for overwintering. This is purely based on the principle in the EU regulation that all animals in organic production need to be fed organic feed. That principle makes total sense in agriculture, where it really matters what chickens or pigs or cows eat to the quality of their eggs or meat or milk. However in the case of honey, it makes no sense at all, because the bees do not produce honey from their own body, but from nectar they collect in nature. But more importantly, none of the winter feed ever ends up in the honey, because the bees consume it during the winter, and any leftovers are removed from the hives in the spring.
On top of that, it is not even the same bees that make the honey in the summer as the ones that ate the winter feed, because the generation that overwinters dies in the spring and a completely new generation of bees will make the honey in the summer. Those bees never even have anything to do with the winter feed.
To anyone who can think for themselves rather than just following rules, this is crazy.
There are several other reasons why we have so far decided not to go officially organic, but I shall leave it at that.
Organic is all about paperwork and blindly following procedures to the letter. It is not about quality. They pretend that following the procedures will automatically lead to a cleaner product, but that is just an assumption that is not tested.
We prefer to use our expertise in environmental science and our own understanding of the bees and honey production to focus on what really matters: animal welfare (organic still allows to use a gas-powered leaf-blower to harvest honey), all natural materials (better than organic) and fresh wax. Our method of not using old wax is at least as good as what is required by organic rules, and we anyway take care to set up our apiaries in clean environments where they are surrounded by mostly forests or organic agriculture, so that makes no difference.
Finally we do not just rely on procedure, but we test our honey in a laboratory to make sure it is clean. The laboratory tests we get done are testing to organic limits, but the limits for how much contamination is allowable in organic honey do not even matter, because the tests literally detected no contaminants at all in our honey.
