ORGANIC..why is honey NOT organic?

Question

why is honey considered not organic.. is it OF living compound but NOT living??

Answer 1

Chemically, honey is about as organic as you can get.  It probably is not considered "organic" by the misguided health food nuts because you can't control where the bees collect the pollen.

Answer 2

"Organic" regarding food does not actually mean anything.

In terms of chemistry, honey is a mixture of a host of organic molecules, including carbohydrates, sugars, and ashes.

Answer 3

considered by whom?

organic means it contains the element carbon.  Honey has sugars so, it's organic.

Answer 4

Honey is a very difficult product to lable organic, because of the very nature of bees.

To be labled "organic" in the U.S.A., no drugs, hormones, pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, ect (except for very certain ones which are deemed OK to use on organic crops) can be used.

Honey bees will fly up to 5 miles from their hive, in search of pollin/nectar.  Usually they stick within 2 miles of the hive though.

So for a honey to be TRUELY organic, the hive would have to sit in the middle of a 10 mile square, completely organic farm, for the bees to gather their pollin/nectar from only certified organic plants.  

That really isn't likely that someone has an organic farm, 10 miles square.  More likely the bees are going to be on a small organic farm of only 10 acres or so, and are going to gather a lot of their pollin/nectar from the organic farm, but they are also going to wander to farms which use all kinds of chemicals, and to the landscaped yards of peoples homes which may be just chocked full of chemicals.

The long and short of it is, because farmers cannot control where honey bees fly and gather their food....nearly impossibly to have a truely organic honey.  (Organic in this case meaning no chemicals)

~Garnet

Permaculture homesteading/farming over 20 years

Answer 5

Honey is organic.  It is primarily sugar and that is certainly an organic compound.  It isn't an organic compound because it is a mixture of various compounds.

Answer 6

A molecule is considered "organic" if it originates in living things and contains chains of carbon atoms. Honey qualifies on both counts; it's produced by insects (bees) and is mostly sugar (which is generally classified as an organic molecule).

"Organic" can also refer to the means used to produce it (as in "organic carrots." However, it doesn't look like that was the meaning you intended.

Answer 7

honey is a waste product of bees. it cant be organic.

Answer 8

honey is transplanted sugar from flowers

Answer 9

it is made of organic chemicals.

it can be an "organic food" depending on how it is made:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

this is the case with all "organic foods"

"organic food" is basically any food that is grown without using antibiotics, hormones, ect.

Answer 10

Organic means literally that it contains carbon. If it contains carbon it means that it is living or at some time in the past was living. Honey contains carbon and was a part of a living flower at one time, so it is definitely organic. Honey growers don't like honey labeled as an "organic food" because it is made from bees and you can not totally control where bees collect their nectar. To be labeled as an organic food it would have to be collected from all plants which have not been fertilized with chemical fertilizers or had any chemical pesticides used on them. Many people strive to produce organic honey, but no one could be completely sure that it was, so the term "organic honey" should never be used.