Probably, more than half of the honey production is made as a pastime leisure hobby, often by individuals without accounting and VAT registration. This causes the market to be largely uncontrollable, an ideal playground for adulteration and other illegal practices and meaning that official statistics are entirely untrustworthy. Effective measures to make honey production profitable and legal includes subsidization of the production by use of conditionality principles and allowing the marketing of honeyblends besides genuine honey that should be traceable to those that filled it onto the glasses.

These are the "take home messages" from the keynote speech of Henning Lyngsø Foged at the annual BeSafeBeeHoney conference, held in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the days 6-7 May 2025. Click here for the entire presentation with the title "Indicators for a healthy honey market and policies to support them".