Rick Scott touts benefits of local honey

Sen. Rick Scott told a Colorado radio audience Thursday of his interest in beekeeping and his preference for local honey wherever he may be.

Scott, interviewed on KOA Colorado, was asked at the beginning of the interview by Ross Kaminsky about beekeeping, a subject about which Scott had previously not spoken in detail. On Thursday, that changed, with the Senator expressing his interest in bees and honey when asked if he had done beekeeping.

“I want to. I actually bought it for one of my daughters. She bought her first house. She said she wanted to do it. So I bought her the stuff. And she still hasn’t done it,” Scott recollected.

The conversation flowed toward honey from there, with Scott saying he’d “have honey every day” if beekeeping were part of his life, and the host touting the benefits of local honey as a natural anti-allergen.

“That’s right,” Scott affirmed. “When I’m in D.C., I make sure I have honey from the D.C. area. When I’m in Naples, Florida, where I live, I have honey from Naples, Florida.”

Despite the enthusiasm of the Senator and his interviewer for the anti-allergenic properties of local honey, benefits may not be scientifically provable.

Healthline cautions that “while allergy shots have been proven to be effective, honey hasn’t.”

“When a person eats local honey, they are thought to be ingesting local pollen. Over time, a person may become less sensitive to this pollen. As a result, they may experience fewer seasonal allergy symptoms … But the amounts of pollen from the environment and plants are thought to be very small and varied. When a person eats local honey, they have no guarantee how much (if any) pollen they’re being exposed to.”

Scott, who signed legislation in 2016 that made Tupelo Honey the official state honey, has used these local radio hits to explain somewhat esoteric food preferences before.

During a May interview on WIOD, the Senator waxed poetic about Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cheese, as Gary Fineout noted. Scott soon enough extolled American cheese as well.