Honey is the entity – why labelling matters

Has she quantified the hours spent on producing her honey? No. “I wouldn’t want to know,” Evelyn O’Reilly laughs, implying she knows quite well how much time and space it takes up in her Butlersbridge home house.

To give some context: Evelyn touches her honey jar five times before it goes to sale. She unpacks it, washes it in the dishwasher, then off with it into the oven to eradicate any residue. Then the honey is poured in. Screw on the lid and stick on the label. ‘Evelyn’s Pure Irish Honey’ is sold locally in different shops. 100% pure honey from Irish bees. The real deal.

A new EU-wide honey labelling rule protects this entity and adds value to the work Evelyn and all the other Irish beekeepers put into producing local honey, without misleading information.

“The grandchildren are coming this weekend, so I will have to tidy this away,” she says circling the homely living room dodging all honey-related equipment. It feels like a space where children fall silent over homemade cakes and adults slump into lived-in sofas for a chat.

But for now, the kitchen counters are stacked with supers – square wooden boxes of filled honey frames – while the dining table holds a contraption to sieve honey through residue wax. A metal trough collects the wax capping that she scrapes off before she lifts the frames into the round bulky extractor. This will run for hours on end. From there, the honey flows through a sieve into a drum. The 35 litre drums form a line from the kitchen into the living room - neatly labelled with the location of the hive the honey originated from.

Evelyn has always been meticulous about traceability: “I want to stand behind my product.” As member of the Cavan Beekeepers Association she has been advocating for proper labelling. The new EU-regulation stipulate that producers have to list the countries of origin where the honey was harvested as well as the percentage of each. All in the principal field of vision, meaning it cannot be hidden on the back label. The new EU-rule came into effect past June, but stores, however, can still empty their older stocks. “I don’t think people have seen the change just yet,” Evelyn believes.

A spot check in the local supermarket confirms this observation: Boyne Valley Honey pure and natural. Mileeven Pure Honey. Healy Family 100% Organic Honey. Small writing on the back of the jars reveals: All a blend of EU and non EU products.

“If it at least was honey, you’d have some hope, but an awful lot of these that come in they are actually blended with some sort of syrup, sugarwater, palmsugar, anything to increase the volume for greater profit margins,” says Evelyn. “They sell it for three to four euro and consumers ask why we are selling jars for €7,50.”

She doesn’t blame them. It’s far too misleading: “I feel for people, because they see an array of honeys with Irish names. And [in some cases], it’s not Irish honey at all.”

Another issue the beekeepers have is the quality of the product – or lack thereof: “When you see something that is blended, you have no idea of its origin. In the EU we have very strict controls what we can and cannot use on hives in terms of medication, treatment, antibiotics, whereas many of the non EU countries have a very different approach. We have no idea what comes in.”

To Evelyn, consumers end up buying an unknown product - highlighting why clarity is needed for everyone.

“I very much welcome the new legislation and I even welcome the fact you can’t say something is “hot honey”. You have to say it is honey with chili, because honey is the entity.”

Real honey is a pure natural sweet substance made by bees with no added food ingredients or additives. Honey must meet certain criteria in terms of density and water content so it won’t ferment. With a refractometer Evelyn checks the level of moisture of the honey she just harvested. It has 16%. Perfect.

Today, like most days, Evelyn has been out since six in the morning. She keeps several hives at the top of her garden in Butlersbridge, at the family farm and some in Crossdoney.

“It’s easier to take the honey when the bees aren’t as active yet.”

How many bees does she have? “Too many.”

Currently there are 20 hives with colonies - around 50,000 bees.

Through her role with the Cavan Beekeepers Association, Evelyn teaches aspiring beekeepers the trade. But really “everyone finds their own way”, she says. Laying pattern of the queen, number of eggs laid per cell, swarm activity, queen cells: “You can go into so much detail and what it means for your hive and longevity.”

Evelyn estimates it takes about two, three years to get accustomed to the bees. Some people, she says, have given up, simply because it was more time consuming then they thought.

In the spring months a beekeepers checks their hives once a week: Queen activity, swarm control, adding supers for the bees to expand into and fill. Sometimes they could fill it with honey in a week. She lifts one of her frames – 12 fit in a super – and weighs it: 1554grams of honey. They say not to harvest more than half of what the bees have produced so they have enough over the winter.

Come autumn, Evelyn will start cleaning, scraping, bleaching, charing the supers and frames. Recycle as much wax as possible for the next season. And maybe, if she has the patience, make a few candles. But it’s “messy business”.

After 13 years making honey, she has built a steady, small business. Fully aware that there can be “disaster years”, like 2020 when she unknowingly added a sick hive, infecting them all.

On the first page of her honey diary, Evelyn has noted the number of hives and amount of honey harvested since 2013. Year one, one hive, no honey. Year two 6,5 litres. 2020: disease struck; all 13 hives gone. 2025: 16 hives with an average of 34.5 litres.

Knock on a woodframe. This year looks good as well. “Better get to it.”