09/23/2024
BEESPLAINING: Debunking the Myths of Crystallized Honey
There is a very widely held belief that honey that granulates or crystallizes is not pure honey. That the beekeeper has fed sugar or syrup to the bees and that bees have then made honey from this sugar, and that this honey forms crystals similar to granulated sugar.
One of my own customers once asked: 'Hanna, are you sure your honey is not just sugar water you have fed to your bees?' This is because he had bought a few months supply of honey and it had started going cloudy and eventually granulated in the jar. Or as one of my followers commented recently in a discussion about set honey: 'I'm a sceptic. Any honey in the supermarkets that have crystallized, the beekeeper has probably fed water and sugar in the winter to their bees. I will not buy it.'
And I understand why people are skeptical when it comes to honey. They have every right to be. Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world. It often makes it to the top three of the common food fraud lists. You will find reports about fake imported ‘honey’ made up from syrup with added colourants and hear about honeybees kept in enclosed environments and fed syrup to invert into honey. But it's not small scale beekeepers who do this, this is done on a large scale by the big players.
A recent EU study showed that nearly 50% of all honey imported into the EU was suspect. The situation in the US and around the world is the same, if not worse. Hence, there is real reason for the consumer to be concerned and to look for ways to ensure that the honey they buy is indeed the real deal. But what is the deal with granulated honey? Does honey crystallise because beekeepers have given the bees sugar?
The truth may surprise you, because not only is this not true, it is also quite often the opposite: Real honey often granulates more rapidly than fake honey. Let me explain.
Real honey is made from nectar which contains natural sugars, Fructose and Glucose predominantly. Bees collect nectar from flowers and then dry it out to make honey. Honey contains about 16-20% moisture, about 80% natural sugars (glucose and fructose mainly) as well as pollen, propolis, enzymes etc. Different plants produce different nectars, not only do they have different flavours, they also contain different sugars. Some are high in fructose and others are high in glucose. While fructose sugars remain liquid for long, glucose sugars granulate rapidly. This is why certain high glucose honeys like oilseed r**e (canola) and ivy go hard only days after extracting, and other high fructose honeys like fuchsia and blackberry stay liquid for longer.
The presence of pollen also speeds up granulation, so if the honey has not been overly filtered to remove pollen, the way that most small to medium scale beekeepers like ourselves process our honey, it will tend to granulate more rapidly. Much of the imported and commercially produced supermarket honeys have been finely filtered to remove pollen, which means that the honey cannot be geographically traced and it also delays the granulation process.
Fake honey is typically a mixture of real honey and other sugar syrups. These syrups can come from plants like sugar cane, corn, or rice. They are cheaper and easier to produce than genuine honey. The end product then has colour and flavours added to it to resemble honey. Fake honey is made in a number of different ways, but one thing that they all have in common is that the ‘honey’ has been overly heated and filtered. The heating prevents granulation as it melts the sugars and delays granulation. This over processing and adulteration is the reason why we should be more concerned with honey that does not granulate than honey that does.
Many beekeepers feed their bees at different times of the year when there are no other food sources available. This should not be confused with what the fraudsters do: we feed to keep our bees alive, they use sugar syrups to produce fake honey...
So next time you’re in the supermarket choosing between that cheap squeezy bottle of honey of dubious origin, and the honey from the local beekeeper which is pricier and has started to go a bit cloudy, ask yourself which is more likely to be fake. I hate to break it to you, but it is often the one that looks too good and is too cheap to be true…
Courtesy of hannasbees
