Does local honey help with seasonal allergies? An honest answer

Ask around at any farmers market and someone will tell you a spoonful of local honey a day keeps hay fever away. As beekeepers, it would be easy to repeat that. We would rather tell you what the evidence shows.

The theory

The idea is similar to allergy shots: eating small amounts of local pollen might gradually train your immune system to tolerate it.

What the studies found

The catch is that most seasonal allergies are triggered by wind-borne pollen from trees, grasses and weeds, and those pollens are not what bees mainly collect. A small 2002 controlled trial compared local unfiltered honey, national filtered honey and a corn syrup placebo, and found no difference in allergy symptoms between the groups.

A 2011 Finnish pilot study is often cited on the other side. People with birch pollen allergy who ate honey with birch pollen deliberately added showed better symptom control than those taking allergy medication alone. That is promising, but it was honey with pollen added in a controlled way, not ordinary local honey, and it was a small study.

Our take

Local honey is not an allergy treatment, and it should not replace anything your doctor has recommended. Enjoy raw local honey for what it reliably is: honey that has not been heated or stripped of its pollen, from bees that live near you.