El­sa Wrench

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When I heard the buzz, I felt a sour­ness rise up in my throat and threat­en to choke me.

The Bee­keep­ers As­so­ci­a­tion was plan­ning to gath­er out­side Par­lia­ment last Fri­day to protest the gov­ern­ment's in­ten­tion to im­port hon­ey.

To bee or not to bee, I fret­ted, as my stom­ach quiv­ered with anx­i­ety. Had the sweet sto­ry of lo­cal hon­ey had turned bit­ter?

The bee­keep­ers had rea­son to feel stung. T&T hon­ey has won many in­ter­na­tion­al awards and, at the re­cent Caribbean Bee Con­gress in St Croix, won the prize for the Best Tast­ing Hon­ey in the Caribbean.

The bee­keep­ers al­so com­plain that im­port­ed hon­ey, which may be con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed, ex­pos­es the lo­cal in­dus­try to Colony Col­lapse Dis­or­der, which hap­pens when work­er bees go on strike.

Such has led to the dis­ap­pear­ance of mil­lions of bee hives in Eu­rope and Amer­i­ca.