Prague Airport Honey Receives 100% Rating and Wins Gold Medal for Tenth Time in Row
For the tenth time in a row Prague Airport has succeeded in the Czech Honey contest, held annually by the Czech Beekeepers Association. Once again, the airport blossom honey received a 100% rating and won a gold medal. The contest focuses on parameters such as water content, sucrose, electrical conductivity, correctness of information on the labels, and the overall aesthetic impression of the honey packaging. Prague Airport has been submitting its honey samples to the competition since 2013.
Soňa Hykyšová, Prague Airport Environment, Sustainability, and ESG Director, is content with the way airport bees prosper. She commented on the contest results saying: “Beekeeping was established at the airport in November 2011, primarily as a means of air quality biomonitoring, to assess the air transport impact on the quality of the environment in the airport surrounding areas. The collected pollen samples are subjected to analyses by the accredited laboratory of the University of Chemistry and Technology Prague. Biomonitoring using bees is only a small part of the overall environmental monitoring, where the airport monitors about 40 parameters above the scope of legal requirements.”
Prague Airport has expanded digitization into this area and now uses a system for electronic monitoring of bee colonies to check the weight of the hives, the temperature, and the acoustic behaviour in the bee colony, which helps beekeepers ensure its health.
There are currently six bee colonies on Václav Havel Airport Prague premises, which produced approximately forty kilograms of honey this year.