Are bees really going extinct

Meant to say (and I bet you thought my response was abnormally concise) that I totally agree about buying direct from beekeepers if you possibly can. Not so much from the allergy point of view, but because that way there's a much better chance that what you're getting is actually honey: concentrated nectar from flowers.

It's very difficult to distinguish honey from natural sources and "honey" that the bees make from processing sugar syrup. That's particularly so if set out to deceive and mix the two together, so there is a little bit of the typical honey smell, and lab analysis finds some of the trace minerals and pollen grains that real honey contains.

I can't recall the figures off the top of my head, but I read a while back that the amount of honey produced in China and exported from there over the last decade or so has shot up, while the number of known hives in the country has remained basically static. You've gotta wonder what's really going on, and where all the stuff ends up. As a beekeeper, I can tell you that it's very unlikely that Chinese beekeepers have found a way of making their bees work twice or three times as hard when they collect nectar from flowers, but I also know that if you feed sugar syrup to a strong hive in the summer, they can easily convert sugar syrup into twenty kilos of "honey" in a week.

Also, commercial honey sellers aim for a product that's blandly uniform, so they will blend honey from a number of sources. Individual beekeepers sell honey that's been made from whatever local plants happened to do well over the previous spring and summer in the area within a couple of miles of their hives, so there will be subtle differences in taste and aroma.

And, as ever, the little guy is at the mercy of big commercial forces, so what beekeepers get from bulk sales is a lot less than what they can reasonably charge if they sell it direct to the consumer.

Finally, buying supermarket honey isn't great from humane point of view. PETA (as usual) talks a load of crap about honey and beekeepers, and some vegans have screwy, ill-informed ideas about the topic, but but it is true that some of the really big beekeeping businesses treat their bees very badly. Hobby beekeepers and smaller concerns generally exercise greater care.