Around one jar of honey in three sold worldwide is thought to be adulterated — cut with syrup, or labelled with a country it never came from. It is a hard thing to prove either way. Honey looks like honey.
We keep records for every hive we open: what we saw, what we treated for, when the supers went on, and which hives filled which bucket. Most beekeepers keep some version of this in a notebook. We keep ours in a way that can be checked.
What that actually means
When we treat a colony for varroa, the treatment is recorded with the date. Every treatment has a withdrawal period — a length of time before honey from that hive can legally be sold. Our system will not let honey from that hive into a batch until the period has cleared. Not a reminder. It refuses.
That is the part we would want to see, as a customer.
The honest bit
We are still building this. NectarLedger is now live on a public blockchain. From this season, our hives, inspections and treatments are recorded in it, and every harvest from now on will be too. Honey already on sale comes from earlier harvests, and we don’t yet put a code on the jar that lets you check a batch for yourself. That’s the next step.
We would rather tell you that than imply something we cannot yet stand behind. That is rather the point of the whole exercise.
For other beekeepers
The software is called NectarLedger, and we built it because we needed it.
Hive records, inspections, treatments and withdrawal periods are free, and stay free — for any beekeeper, not just us. It works with no signal at the apiary and sends when you get back, because most apiaries have none. It reads an NFC tag on the hive so you are not typing a hive number in gloves.
If you sell honey and want the records to become proof on the jar, that part is paid. Keeping records costs us nothing to run; putting proof on a blockchain costs real money. So you pay when you sell, not before.