Behind The Hive: PURITI’s Commitment To Ethical Beekeeping

Here at PURITI, we work hard to deliver a product that isn’t just high quality and great-tasting but also created with sustainable and ethical practice. Thanks to the dedicated work of our beekeepers, we can produce high-grade mānuka honey with a process we can stand by. 

With the growing importance of ethical practice in all food industries - especially honey - our beekeepers work hard to not just meet the standard, but raise it higher. The welfare and sustainability of our hives is a critical component to the creation of PURITI’s products, we remain committed as ever to maintaining this. 

Our beekeepers are experts - knowing exactly what our bees need and how to produce the best-tasting and highest-quality mānuka honey to leave New Zealand’s shores. 

What Is Ethical Beekeeping?

Ultimately, ethical beekeeping is all about ensuring the welfare and safety of bees and their natural surroundings. 

Preserving their environment, treating the bees and their process with respect, maintaining the hives and protecting the hives from external dangers are among the practices that our beekeepers commonly follow. To care for the honey, workers must first care for the ones that create it. 

It’s a requirement for our beekeepers to understand not just bees and their honey-making processes, but the wider picture as a whole. It’s learning about the environment - the range of factors that influence the honey-making process. Beekeepers that understand this ecosystem will practise their craft ethically and responsibly. 

Caring for bees means caring about the world they live in. Our beekeepers know this, and their work reflects it. 

The role of PURITI’s beekeepers

The beekeeping crew at PURITI are trained, expert professionals who deeply understand and care for the lifestyle and work of their bees. They understand the impacts of their work - if it’s done well, the bees thrive and the mānuka honey produced is high quality.

We ensure every beekeeper who joins PURITI is qualified, but ongoing training is a pivotal part of our crew’s ongoing development. Our beekeepers will be regularly researching new sustainable practices and refining their craft with the best interests of the bees. 

There’s day-to-day responsibilities that our beekeepers hold. Depending on the weather conditions, our team might be carrying out pest checks - which ensure the bees are safe from animals that might do harm - or be monitoring the colonies for any signs of distress. 

The beekeepers will inspect the brood (or nurseries) inside the hives to make sure the baby bees are growing healthily, they’ll also check whether particular colonies have larger amounts of eggs appearing. This might be a sign the queen bee is actively laying. 

Add in the additional responsibilities of caring for the wider environment, plus harvesting the ​mānuka, and you quickly realise our beekeepers have a lot of work on their plate. It’s critical the process is ethically practised so our bees remain safe and the honey remains at the highest standard possible. 

How do our beekeepers ethically maintain and harvest the mānuka honey?

Beekeeping is all about working in harmony with the bees. There’s a partnership between the keeper and the insects, when both work together the product is of the highest quality. 

It begins with letting nature run its course. Our beekeepers know that our bees have been producing mānuka honey for thousands of years without their help, so there’s no room for micromanagement or over-controlling the bee’s environment. Sometimes the best way to help bees when they’re overcoming environmental or health challenges, is to leave them alone. 

Our beekeepers practise a non-invasive approach to maintaining the hives and harvesting the honey. This is done to minimise the stress and disruption to the bees, it’s critical they remain feeling safe so the quality of their product never drops. 

The queen, for example, is integral to a hive’s survival. When our beekeepers harvest the mānuka, they’re trained to recognise the queen and avoid disrupting her during the honey collection. Also, we avoid any practices that encourage artificial mating within the hives, to ensure the queen does what she does best - populate the colonies. 

Our hives are designed for the environmental thriving of the bees. We actively avoid overcrowding the hives and we’re also intentional about the size of the hives - for instance the larger they are, the more often the bees can find themselves overworked. Our hives are sized appropriately to protect the work ethic of these productive creatures. 

We won’t use honey replacements or any harmful chemicals, we’ll also avoid any pesticides that can cause serious harm to bee populations. At the end of the day, our keepers are constantly working to provide a sustainable future for our bees - which means remaining vigilant to their practices and tweaking them whenever necessary.

The benefit of high standards for mānuka honey beekeeping

Because mānuka is such a high quality honey product, the results must be reflected in the work to create it. The ethical practices of our beekeepers leads to a superior form of mānuka honey, free from contaminants and rich in natural nutrients. 

Bees need the freedom to create mānuka honey in the most natural way possible - the more human interference, the more likely the product will lose its value, either through its taste or overall quality. It’s critical that when our beekeepers are overseeing the honey making process, they understand their role is one of stewardship, not control. 

Some beekeepers might believe they know best and fall into the trap of over-controlling the mānuka making process. This will likely lead to a form of honey product that barely reflects mānuka’s quality, ingredients and taste. Our beekeepers are different, they understand the delicacy of the work the bees are carrying out - and what a beekeeper’s responsibility actually looks like. 

We’re transparent with our ethical approach to beekeeping, because it’s important our customers can trust the product they’re purchasing. We live in an age where sustainability and ethical practiceactually means something- they can’t be meaningless virtues, they’ve got to be put to work. 

Fortunately, every team member at PURITI - starting with our beekeepers on the ground - are deeply dedicated to sustainable practice. 

It’s not just a virtue, it’s a conviction that our entire team holds dear. It ensures the honey production remains as natural as possible, and that the product we produce is the best form of mānuka honey available on the market. 

Ethical beekeeping results in the best mānuka products available

At PURITI, ethical beekeeping is more than a practice, it’s a promise. Our dedication to ethical beekeeping ensures that every jar of mānuka honey is hitting the highest standards, whilst still supporting sustainable and responsible production. 

Our beekeepers are always concentrated on the well-being of our bees, ensuring their harvesting and maintenance work supports environmental stewardship and the health of our ecosystems. 

Purchase PURITI’s mānuka product and you’re not just buying a world class product, but you’re subscribing to the values of ethical practice and sustainability that we stand by. 

You’re making a choice that goes beyond honey - it’s supporting the future of the planet and the welfare of its hard working pollinators.