
Honey in Bali
When you see a company, as environmentally focused as Wanaprasta pastured organic, sell only two kinds of honey and specialise in wild honey, questions immediately arise. And yes, it does relate to issues of pesticides and fungicides, but there are other significant reasons too.
Wanaprasta pastured organic has specialised in Apis Dorsata and Melipona Tetragonula laeviceps for some years and it’s not because they have some issue with the honeybee itself. Apis mellifera is a wonderful insect that deserves our utmost respect they insist.
But there are significant issues in promoting Apis mellifera (honey bee) products here in Bali.
The first issue concerns the environmental credentials of the farm that harvests the hives. If there is no confidence in a farms overall regard for the environment, Wanaprasta Pastured Organic simply loses interest in the products of that farm.
Honey sourced from environments heavily contaminated by pesticides, fungicides or other toxic chemicals is honey Wanaprasta avoids at all cost. It seems like a simple equation as Wanaprasta pastured organic religiously inspects sources with carefully trained personnel.
The second issue concerns the extreme difficulty of finding pure honey. Even more so for Wanaprasta as they raise the bar on environmental responsibility. Honey dealers learned long ago that a single bottle of pure honey could easily become 2 bottles, or three, or five. Enter stage left, the extraordinarily cheap sugar cane, corn or rice syrups.
The pure honey sellers suddenly found it impossibly difficult to sell their honeys in competition with the blended honey, which of course were labelled “ real honey” too. To survive, pretty much everyone trading honey was selling syrup with honey added. It could be 75/25, 50/50 or if really unlucky 20/80. How much real honey was added was defined by the motivations of the purveyor.
The huge advantage behind this honey fraud is that the syrup actually makes the honey look, move and feel absolutely like the real stuff. Well at least it does a good job duplicating mellifera farm honey. Some people have even become convinced that the fake stuff looks more real than real honey!
Wanaprasta learned some lessons the hard way, after many years sourcing farmed honey, and it’s a good lesson shared with other honey buyers.
In the early days Wanaprasta Pastured Organic had no problem sourcing unadulterated honey because they found a source of pure unmixed honey, supplied by a wizened, half blind 80+ year old Balinese farmer who remembered the Japanese armies marching songs from 1942!
But when he passed away Wanaprasta had to look around for a new supplier. They found a few different suppliers and compared their honey to the old mans stored reserves. But it was hard to tell the difference! They seemed identical. So Wanaprasta began to research through the usual folklore tests. You know the ones..... the ants, the swishing plates, the behaviour in water. They applied everything they could to research a reliable supplier.
But honey counterfeiters are not as silly as to just add water to boost their profits. Water, in fact, is not a clever additive in honey. It waters down the honey making it visibly flawed and it causes the honey to quickly ferment dramatically reducing the shelf life.
But the heavily processed sugar syrups blend seamlessly with honey. The honey sellers learned this quickly too. Real honey sellers simply cant compete with the prices of the ‘cut honey’ and they get squeezed out of the market. At the end of the day, the only way honey sellers can stay in business is to sell cut honey themselves.
Wanaprasta Pastured Organic eventually thought they found the right person. A younger guy, highly recommended by other foodies, restaurants etc. However, in those days, Wanaprasta were constantly experimenting. Especially fermentations, and they noticed some strange things happening with the new honeys. Wanaprasta doesn’t want to tell us exactly because it’s their advantage card in the game of honey buying. But needless to say their ability to test honey accurately gave them a major advantage. Wanaprasta sourced fresh honey, cross referenced, and quickly realised some highly regarded honey suppliers didn’t offer pure honey. It was some kind of blend.
So the long journey of frustration for Wanaprasta began. Much heralded honey traders were recommended and none survived the tests.
Wanaprasta eventually gave up on farmed mellifera honey altogether. They felt responsible for the trust customers placed in them, and in the end, couldn’t overcome the discomfort with the status of adulterated and often pesticide contaminated farmed honey in Indonesia.
But interestingly, Wanaprasta pastured organic didn’t give up entirely on honey. According to Tri Sutrisna, Wanaprasta’s senior food manager, they just found better pathways. Enter stage right, the pristine tropical wild honeys of Indonesia. Guaranteeing a more reliable supply and a higher quality more suitable for consumers who wanted to avoid the pesticide/ fungicide matrix.
Wanaprasta turned to the wild honeys, not yet discovered by the fakers and with the added advantage of being pristinely pure and raw. The conditions of harvest and type of honey meant the crap hadn’t been cooked out of the combs to extract every last millimeter of precious liquid. They are also untouched by human agricultural abuses, pesticide and fungicide free. There were so many advantages to raw wild honey they wondered why they didn’t see it years before!
Tri Sutrisna tells us that Wanaprasta tried to hang in there with the farmed honey but it became harder and harder to find honey that wasn’t mixed with corn or sugarcane syrup. In the end they packed up and walked away from it, having registered too many test failures to make it viable.
But it seems they didn’t despair. Following the path of the wild honey hunters, deeper into untouched forests, Wanaprasta (which means return to nature in Sanskrit) discovered the complexities of raw wild honey sourced from the world’s biggest and heaviest bees - Apis Dorsata.
Eventually they sourced samples from every corner of Indonesia and kept sample test pots to keep for identification. The flavours of the Dorsata were excitingly varied but the textures and fermentations proved quite consistent.
It was the same for the tiniest of tiny honey producers, the Melipona. Wanaprasta specialised in them too. Fascinating, little researched, but prized medicinal honeys recognised in tropical civilisations across the world since ancient times. There are literally thousands of species and they are poorly researched.
The melipona, predominantly the tetragonula species, is the “go to secret” ingredient in most Balinese healers potions. Fascinatingly selected as a medicine across dozens of civilisations around the world, from central Africa, Asia, Australia, and the tropical Americas. Aztec armies were famously attended by medic units carrying thick pouches of various types of melipona honey. According to the Jesuit codecs, as a respiratory medicine and packed into deep wounds it had no peer.
Today you could consider Wanaprasta as something of a mini expert on both these unique honeys. They have even learned to semi domesticate the tetragonula laeviceps on their farms, designing a nest box most suitable for harvesting the honey with minimal harm. The nests are otherworldly. Looking like a miniature ‘alien’ movie set, with honey pots not much bigger than peas, hanging like captured astronauts. Swallow one and feeling it pop in the mouth is a rare experience for few people. The “peas” are covered in a soft cerumen (propolis) skin and it feels like the ultimate in natural candy. The soft cerumen is made from plant resins enriched with bee secretions and recent research in Australia has shown that it contains flavonoids and prenylated phenolics that is absent from even Manuka honeybee propolis or honey.
With the Melipona semi domesticated, the Dorsata maintains its wild edge, being mostly harvested in pristine wildernesses, with harvest teams typically trekking for days, before climbing 40 metres to access the massive hives. It’s a quick and light trek in, but a slow and heavy trek out. Two days trek in becomes a 3 day trek out, heavily laden with precious cargo in makeshift backpacks.
There is also a short window of harvest. Harvesting outside an 8 week window each year devastates the hive and virtually kills any chance of the sociable Dorsata recovering. Tri from Wanaprasta reminds us that if we want to be responsible environmentally, and respect the bee, we shouldn’t support harvesting outside late July, August and early September. This is why Wanaprasta buys large amounts of Dorsata honey in that timeframe and stores it chilled.
Dorsata and Laeviceps honey, like most tropical honeys, is more liquid than the farmed Mellifera honey. Being shown a Dorsata honey that was thick would set off red flags immediately.
Laeviceps has its sour edge and Dorsata its extreme soft sweetness. But what we love is that both species prefer pristine forests, and their purity, by honey standards, is simply off the charts. They are the classic ‘return to nature’ spirit that Wanaprasta Pastured Organic seeks to represent.
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