Manuka, the World’s Most Coveted Honey (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Manuka, the World’s Most Coveted Honey (2018)

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49 pointsNoRagrets59 comments

I grew up in NZ and find it hilarious when I see a tub of manuka honey in a supermarket in the US. This is the most genius marketing ripoff of all time. Most honey you could buy in NZ back then was either clover honey or manuka honey, it cost about $3 for the same amount, and there was nothing special about manuka honey. Manuka is just teatree, by the way. And all honey has the same antimicrobial properties -- it has nothing to do with hydrogen peroxide and definitely nothing to do with UMF. The reason honey kills microbes is it has exceptionally low water content.

Exactly, manuka honey was always just ordinary honey in NZ! It's like this article is from an alternate reality or something.

Will trade manuka for maple syrup.

I've read that Canadian maple syrup is the cure for post-election-anxiety.

At least that's how I figure we should market it to our friends down south!

> Canadian maple syrup is the cure for post-election-anxiety.

It's been working wonders for me :-)

> "Exactly, manuka honey was always just ordinary honey in NZ!"

Not any more. Cheaper to buy it in the UK I reckon!

Older beekeepers in NZ will tell you that until the late 1990s/early 00s, it wasn't even considered commercially viable and was only suitable as winter feed for bees, because all anybody wanted to buy was clover. There was not much space in the market for darker honeys from the NZ bush and scragglier hill country. This fit perfectly with the mindset of thousands of NZ farmers, who were diligently clearing the mānuka off their land because it was "scrub" that could be replaced with grass. Fast-forward to the year 2020 C.E. and Comvita is doing mānuka plantations...

Not only was there not much market from it it is also quite difficult to extract.

It also tastes very unusual and I might have guessed that before buying it had I known that Manuka is tea tree.

>The reason honey kills microbes is it has exceptionally low water content.

Do you have a source for this?

A simple search on scholar.google.com for "manuka" and "MRSA" studies in 2020 and there is a substantial amount of evidence showing its unique medical properties.

Honey is hydrophilic. Perhaps that has something to do with its topical medicinal quality.

There are a few reasons why honey is antimicrobial and one of them is it's high osmotic pressure. They also have some hydrogen perexide activity and some honeys such as mānuka have things like methylglyoxal.

>And all honey has the same antimicrobial properties -- it has nothing to do with hydrogen peroxide and definitely nothing to do with UMF. The reason honey kills microbes is it has exceptionally low water content.

Nah. It's about dihydroxyacetone and methylglyoxal, which are found in what is referred to as "active" mānuka honey, and which are not found (or at least not found in such high concentrations) in honey from other flowers. Dihydroxyacetone in mānuka honey converts to methylglyoxal over time. Not all honey from mānuka is "active", and there is an ongoing fight between NZ beekeepers and the NZ Ministry of Primary Industries about the latter's guidelines for what constitutes mānuka honey.

Some or all of these details are glossed over in the article, which is pretty low-quality for HN, but this has probably gone unnoticed because it's a long way from most readers' usual fields of expertise.

I think it is silly for people to buy expensive honey with labels claiming high antibacterial properties, high activity, etc, when there are no proven medical benefits to just eating it. On the other hand, its efficiency as a topical (iirc) antibacterial relative to other honeys is scientifically proven, but you generally can't use the off-the-shelf stuff for that no matter how strong the label says it is. However... people buy all kinds of silly things, and if there's a premium market for such things overseas, and no full-on marketing lies are being told, then I'm all for it. NZ needs a few high-value, high-scarcity exports to make up for all the thousands of tons of milk formula, etc.

I just wanted to push back on the idea that the whole thing isn't science-based at its core. It is. However, it's true that the marketing hype and shady practices (mixing mānuka honey with lower-value kānuka because the two can be very hard to distinguish in testing...) were out of control for a while there, and this has been reigned in somewhat by the MPI guidelines, even if those guidelines have created additional stress and strife for beekeepers in some cases.

edit: A very short primer on DHA and MG in mānuka honey: https://www.analytica.co.nz/Portals/0/Docs/Articles/DHA_MG_a...

edit 2: If any of you readers in the UK or US find yourselves standing in front of a whole shelf full of expensive imported New Zealand honey, try the Arataki rewarewa honey, which is from a honeysuckle-esque NZ native tree. That stuff is incredible.

Topical... my daughters ran around with mānuka honey on their faces for years. Word to the wise... pick your battles carefully.

A very partisan write up. I love NZ honey and make a point of buying a particular NZ manuka honey (arataki) when I see it, but the Australian manuka honey is not "cashing in" on the NZ trade, it has existed for decades and medicinal honey for tropical ulcer treatment has existed for decades in Australia.

The decision to award DOC classification was itself a "cashing in" move despite manuka being patently a semi generic term for plants found throughout Australasia.

It was a smart move, and I don't fault them for seeing this as a tactic in a competitive trade market, but lets not pretend there is a substantive difference between the products here.

NZ manuka honey is now also riven by violent gang crime cashing in on the huge profits. Hive stealing is a thing.

Sugerbag, a dark runny native bees honey in Australia is worth more per kg. Designer chefs want it.

there is a lot of hype w/manuka here and i dont think we have ever heard of australian honey here stateside. a lot of honey is malted sweet syrup sadly. i had to label my honey 'gluten free' and 'organic'...both claims are ridiculous, but labeling is such a headache. we do not have AOC type labeling tho'...except for lavender and orange blossom honey etc that have single floral flavours and not blended, then a radius of 5 acres worth should have the same varietal as advertised. entirely ridiculous. bees dont understand borders or labeling. i even got a bottle of poison oak honey. and no, it wasnt the name of the company. wasnt brave enough to try it.

on a slightly diff note: australian father and son duo have come up with flowhive that is the scorn of old fashioned 'beeks' because it seems to make it too easy to collect honey. i do agree that apiary business can be exploitative and with bees on the loser side.

having had colony collapse for a few years and having had to pay for a commissary kitchen to extract honey, the flow hive design seems more and more appealling. the australians certainly understand their bees.

https://www.honeyflow.com/ : i am pretty smitten but false pride to be a 'real beekeeper' stops me from adopting this obviously clever and elegant design. Beek shaming is real! it's a thing.

If you've got poisonwood honey.. wait til you try Turkish seasonal... HALLUCINOGENIC honey.. (sorry for clickbaity) which actually exists and is a "thing"

I wonder how honey from marijuana would taste like...I guess they don’t have nectar? Anyone knows?

They are wind pollinated not bee pollinated. Maybe in theory bees could collect some pollen but it would be a stretch to get THC into honey.

Except for the fact that it's a poisonous neurotoxin..

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-21/native-honeybees-prov... : thanks for the headsup about sugarbag honey! stingless bees even!

[..]Unlike harvesting from a commercial or hobby hive, taking honey from a native sugarbag hive often means the entire colony is destroyed.

But Dr Smith said land clearing, rather than traditional hunting, was the biggest threat to native bee colonies.

He said sugarbag hunting had a minor impact on the overall population of Australian sugarbag bees and the skill should be preserved.

"What a shame it would be to stop having this practice, this culture, that's been going on for thousands of years and is probably one of the longest honey cultures of the world," he said.[..] < altho this is discouraging. for the bees too.

very interesting. we have many more native bees here in ca than italian honey bees. there is a fallen oak in one of the hiking trails. it was buzzing all the time and the hiker who was with me(and part native american) told me that bees sometimes form hives inside dead hollow trees. and not to tell anyone so they can be undisturbed.

i have a lavender field and also maintain hives. the italian bees are pretty aggressive and native populations have gone down. also..a lot of california native vegetation is actually toxic to italian honey bees. like california buckeye for example. and i think in the south, yellow jessamine. their pollen can kill the italian bees.

thats one of the reasons for bees disappearing too. we also truck in millions of bee cross country for almond pollination which is a bee genocide of a different kind. this is why i feel like if we dont manage habitat we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Australian native bees, apart from not having stingers, are tiny... about the same size as a baby fly. Most importantly, their hive structure is incompatible with normal modern beekeeping hives, hence they honey is taken directly from hives on trees, in the bush. I recall that attempts are being made to have them work in normal boxes, but understand it's tricky.

Also, Jelly Bush is the common name for the NZ equivalent Manuka bush, both are of the tea tree family.

This sugarbag honey reminds me of the Melipona honey from Peru that I learned about in (I think it was) a Netflix documentary about fake honey.

Tasmanian Leatherwood honey also tastes and smells great. Not sure if it's available in the US. Quite a bit cheaper than sugarbag honey.

https://www.leatherwoodhoney.com.au/index.php/our-story/

https://tasmanianhoney.com/about-us/

> NZ manuka honey is now also riven by violent gang crime cashing in on the huge profits. Hive stealing is a thing.

I'd like to see a proof of that. The industry is very consolidated with a few dominant players and a lot of small beekeepers who happened to have manuka on their private land. It went through a boom, prices crashed and most unsavory operators moved on. There may be some opportunistic hive stealing, but that always existed even before manuka was the thing.

Headlines stop around 2019. So you're probably right, it's old news. And, to be fair, it happens/happened here too: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2018-02-27/beekeepers-call...

Anecdotally, (as in, what I hear on the local grapevine) it's still going on. Intimidation, hive destruction etc.

> Manuka is a versatile sugar substitute that’s lower on the glycemic index,” he says. “It won’t spike your blood sugar levels immediately in the way white sugar does.”

The sugar in honey is roughly a 50/50 mix of glucose and fructose, there is nothing metabolically special about the sugar. Fructose has a lower glycemic index because it is metabolized first into triglycerides- it may be better for diabetics in some circumstances but has also been blamed for why people drink too much pop, because the glucose fructose sweetening doesnt leave you sated. From a purely sugar perspective, honey is basically HFCS.

I like to think of it as wine vs vodka. Both have alcohol, but wine is somewhat better for you due to polyphenols

There is little evidence for wine being better than other alcoholic drinks. For example, see https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/is-red-wine-good-actuall... Most of the claimed benefits are either from observational studies or on rats etc.

I visited New Zealand in 2000, and at one small roadside shop they gave us a small jar of Manuka honey for free. At the time I didn't realize there was anything special about it. But it did cement in my mind that New Zealand had the most gracious residents in the world.

Their kindness may be related to the medicinal properties of the honey. I had broken my wrist a week earlier and had a brace screwed into my arm, covered with a bandage.

I'd love to see buckwheat honey in the US. It's dark brown, and it's much tastier than "regular" honey IMO.

I see buckwheat honey all the time at farmer’s markets in the rockies. It’s a favorite of mine too. Not nearly as sweet.

buckwheat honey could be an acquired taste for some. i love it. it's definitely available.

buckwheat is a summer cover crop. that means the (good) beekeepers would allow the bees to keep some for their own food for fall/winter feeding. also...dont know a lot of people who summer cover crop anymore. i guess its definitely niche, but certainly available in the usa.

i cant control where my bees go foraging. so i just label it 'wild flower' honey. in early spring before they swarm, i make sure the brambles are flowering. at that time..even in california..there isnt a whole lot of forage for them when they come out hungry. they also gorge themselves before swarming and so usually there isnt a whole lot early spring honey. its a timing thing. so really..there is no good time window for collecting buckwheat honey. unless we steal it from them and replace it with something else for their feeding.

Buckwheat is grown as a grain crop in some parts of the US and Canada.

Excellent grain as well, cooked in a rice cooker.

Yeah there are a lot of honeys that are nice that you don't see that often.

My grandfather was a beekeeper in Montana and swore by spotted napweed honey. Of course spotted napweed is invasive and should be ripped out when found outside of its native Europe.

I had an interesting chat with John McDermott at the IoT meetup in Auckland last week. He said that honey is one of the most difficult markets for IoT.

What's so hard about it? Connectivity isn't great in NZ - there's no phone signal in the remote places where beehives are common. Artisan beekeepers don't care about analytics to increase their yield; they're just doing it for fun (sometimes after retiring from other careers). Larger companies already have systems in place, or can afford the loss.

It seems like it would be an excellent opportunity: beehives get stolen, or overflow with honey, and the temperature and humidity of the hive have a huge outcome on the resulting product. Swarm Space or LoRaWAN might be able to help with connectivity. But the market is just really hard to get into when the customers don't have an incentive to pay for efficiency.

Getting stolen is the only thing I could think of, temperature and hive humidity aren't usually problems, the beekeeper doesn't control those things, the bees do. Maybe there are a few other things it could be used for but i'm not sure what.

Hive theft has recently become an issue here in Ca.

CA being CA...hives used for pollination services are taxed differently than hives used for honey/orchard pollination. Insurance also treats them differently.

More: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/05/bee-thiev...

[..] “I couldn’t think. I kept messing up the count,” he told me, sitting at a friend’s kitchen table the next morning, shaking his head. He’d hardly slept. “Over half of them were gone, 160 boxes”—days before California’s almond bloom, the biggest and most lucrative pollination event in the world. “Those thieves stole about $70,000 from me,” he said, tallying the insects, equipment, and lost pollination rental fees.

Kuhnhenn, 39—tattooed, with a brown beard, and wearing a black “Right To Bear Arms” T-shirt and jeans—is a commercial beekeeper from Bantry, North Dakota. Like many others in his profession, he makes the bulk of his living from an annual pilgrimage to the Central Valley, where his bees help pollinate the state’s almond crop. In the off-season, back home on his ranch, Bulldog Honey Farms, he manufactures about 80 pounds of summer honey. Wintertime is almond season, and he’d been preparing for the bloom all year. His hives were ready to move into position in the almond orchards. Now was that time, and a bunch of his bees were gone.[..]

Theft is certainly a problem with Mānuka hives

The uses I know of are temperature in order to indicate when the bees have started raising brood in late winter/early spring--warmer hive temp=broodraising--and hive scales, which could theoretically tell you when the bees are about to swarm and would allow you to track how much honey the bees are bringing in in real time. Neither of these are a decent value proposition for commercial beekeepers.

One could have alarms for low/high temp/RH to alert the beekeper when the colony is threatened. Also maybe a weight sensor so they know how much honey there is in the hive. I'm not a beekeper so not entirely sure what they'd want. Anti theft beacons can be easily disabled, especially LoRaWAN and SigFox which need a bigger antenna.

Weren't cell towers and phones detrimental to bees' well being? LoRaWAN and SigFox should be okay though since they only send low bitrate, low energy payloads.

I wonder if you could put a hacked touchscreen digitizer on the bottom of a hive and count varroa mite fall etc

I don't really understand the point of advertising the 'anti-microbial' properties. Antiseptic creams are far less expensive if you're applying it to wounds. Ingesting something for its anti-microbial properties seems a bit strange when there is plenty of research suggesting that having a healthy gut microbiome is beneficial[0]. People eat certain kinds of yoghurt for the very purpose of encouraging gut microbe activity.

Is this purely to advertise to the homeopathic crowd or am I missing something here?

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12967-017-1175-y

Honey is food and cheap. And easily available. And natural. What’s not to love?

Manuka honey is certainly not cheap

Concentrated sugar is unhealthy in all but small doses.

I think Manuka is also used topically.

I have nothing against honey - I enjoy it as much as anyone else.

My point was more that this honey specifically costs far more than normal honey (or even other boutique honeys with a unique flavour) seemingly just because it has the marketing cachet of being 'anti-microbial', which as far as I can tell doesn't seem to be actually beneficial in any way.

What I don't get is how they are marketing their honey around containing higher amounts of something which has putatively negative qualities?

> Methylglyoxal, a highly reactive dicarbonyl compound, is inevitably formed as a by-product of glycolysis. Methylglyoxal is a major cell-permeant precursor of advanced glycation end-products (AGEs), which are associated with several pathologies including diabetes, aging and neurodegenerative diseases. In normal situations, cells are protected against methylglyoxal toxicity by different mechanisms and in particular the glyoxalase system, which represents the most important pathway for the detoxification of methylglyoxal. While the neurotoxic effects of methylglyoxal and AGEs are well characterized, our understanding the glyoxalase system in the brain is more scattered

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.0002...

The equivalent of Manuka honey in the Middle East and Northern Africa regions is Sidr honey. Sidr or Lote tree is very popular and revered in the regions because the tree is mentioned in both Bible and Quran:

https://www.pashaintl.com/blogs/blog/sidr-honey-vs-manuka-ho...

My mate has several barrels of the highest grade manuka honey from the back of his farm. It's very tingy, to the point of being unpalatable.

The sad truth is that most of the commercial manuka honey is nowhere near the purity to get any medicinal benefit, but it tastes much nicer.

Most commercial grade mānuka honey is more than pure enough to get medicinal benefits. That is what UMF is.

I'm going to make so much money with my 'Scalable Manuka CBD Blockchain Honey'

Honey is one of the most adulterated foods. Honey blockchain is probably not a bad idea.

Fun fact, there's more "NZ manuka" honey sold annually in the UK alone than is actually produced in NZ.

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