This year, Israeli honey is made of ‘blood, sweat and tears’
Israeli honey may look like any other, but this year it’s made of “blood, sweat and tears,” according to Yair Schwartz, head of acquisitions at Israel’s largest honey-making business in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai near the border with the Gaza Strip.
Affected disproportionately by the ongoing fighting that broke out on Oct. 7, Israeli beekeepers and honey producers have worked intensively, sometimes risking their lives, to preserve their already vulnerable industry. They also scrambled successfully to meet the Jewish High Holiday period’s soaring demand for their product, Schwartz and others in the industry told JNS.
This effort prevented price hikes and honey shortages in Israel, where local production provides some 80% of the annual consumption of roughly 4,500 tons, said Schwartz.
“It was a tremendous effort but we got the job done. There was too much riding on it for us not to,” said Schwartz, a 63-year-old father of three from Kibbutz Yad Mordechai.
This sense of duty—widely shared among honey professionals in Israel—has ideological foundations in the case of Yad Mordechai. On Oct. 7, the kibbutz’s members narrowly prevented a Hamas massacre. But the situation left the apiary, the kibbutz’s main business, closed for a month because of Hamas’s murderous onslaught.
“You can make and mix honey anywhere, but this is our place and it was clear to us that we needed to return,” said Oriana Tubul, the manager of Yad Mordechai’s honey factory, which has 40 employees and whose establishment in 1936 predated that of Israel by 12 years.
Honey-making has symbolic significance in Israel, where it is one of just a few important products that are produced almost entirely locally. Honey is also emblematic of the beauty and plenty of the Land of Israel, and the Jewish People’s attachment to it. In the Hebrew Bible, God and others describe the Promised Land repeatedly as “a land flowing with milk and honey.”
“Returning to make Israeli produce is part of our revival, part of the rehabilitation,” said Ido Dvir, another honey maker from Yad Mordechai.
Stocks needed to be replenished ahead of Rosh Hashanah, when honey consumption tends to increase as a result of Jews eating apples and honey as part of the holiday’s rituals. Israelis consume about 40% of their annual honey intake in the Hebrew calendar month of Tishrei, which begins with Rosh Hashanah, according to data from 2022 provided by Israel’s Honey Council, which is the main union of apiculture professionals.
Yad Mordechai’s honey makers had other practical reasons for reopening the factory as soon as possible: Farmers in the heavily agricultural Tekuma Region, near Gaza, depend on beehives for crop pollination.
“We’re honey producers but honey is almost a byproduct of what we do,” said Schwartz, referencing pollination.
Avocado groves with beehives produce twice and sometimes three times more fruit than without hives, he noted.
“So we’re the cornerstone for the rehabilitation of the whole region,” where much of Israel’s tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, leafy greens and bananas are grown, he said.
On Oct. 7, Yad Mordechai, which is situated less than two miles from Gaza, was among the 20-odd towns and locales that Hamas terrorists attacked after crossing the border.
The local security team kept the terrorists who targeted Yad Mordechai out, preventing the sort of mass murder and atrocities committed elsewhere near the border, where Hamas men murdered some 1,200 people and abducted another 251.
No one from the kibbutz was hurt, but the apiary and honey factory shut down for the first time in decades amid heavy rocket fire. They remained closed for about a month, as management worked vigorously to reopen even though the kibbutz had been completely evacuated.
Israeli tanks, often maneuvering at night, ran over some of Yad Mordechai’s 4,000-odd hives. Foreign workers fled Israel in the weeks following the massacre, leaving honey makers understaffed. Often, hives were in areas that the Israel Defense Forces declared off limits for civilians due to rocket and sniper fire from Gaza.
“Some, not many, of the honey keepers risked their lives and went out to their hives in such territories anyway. They are so attached to the bees that they risked their lives to make sure the colonies didn’t die,” said Schwartz, who manages the honey factory’s purchases on top of the kibbutz’s own production.
Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was evacuated once before in 1948 after its fighters and Palmach reinforcements fended off for days a vastly superior Egyptian army force. It was reconquered and resettled months after the evacuation, and it became a national symbol of endurance and revival. After its second evacuation last year, it was among the first border-adjacent locales to return en masse. It is now almost completely repopulated.
One of the beekeepers who sells honey to Yad Mordechai is Boaz Kanot in Moshav Avigdor, situated about 15 miles northeast of Yad Mordechai. Kanot, a 67-year-old father of three children who all also work with bees, was among those who lent competitors from Yad Mordechai their beekeeping gear so they could tend to their own hives.
“The beekeeping industry is pretty tight-knit,” said Kanot, who for years has sold most of his honey to Yad Mordechai. He has no contract with the kibbutz but he says he can always depend on it to buy his honey for a fair price.
“We beekeepers thought we had it tough before Oct. 7. Then we found out how tough can get,” Kanot said.
As the fighting spread from the Gaza area to Israel’s north, Hezbollah’s rocket fire from Lebanon has also complicated honey production in the Galilee, Kanot said.
“It was an added difficulty on top of preexisting ones,” he said.
He was referencing the challenges and setbacks faced by beekeepers in Israel and all over the world due to declining bee populations, new diseases and the negative effects of urbanization on apiculture. In addition to that, there’s also the issue of fake honey, which is often produced in China, marketed falsely as made in the European Union and reaches the Israeli market through mislabeled import, Kanot said.
Neither those longstanding issues nor the war-related complications will deal a death blow to Israel’s honey-making industry, said Kanot.
“We are here to stay, we are driven by a sense of mission and aided by the best technology, much of it developed here in Israel,” he said. The setbacks, he added, “only mean more hard work. But that’s something none of us has ever shied away from, or we wouldn’t be in this business in the first place.”
