honey

Fake honey – really?

Fake honey

Fake honey is everywhere especially in the supermarkets according to several sources.

I should have known. There I am signing petitions to save the bees, reports everywhere of the bees dying, less honey being produced and what do I see on the supermarket shelves – layers upon layers of honey. It can’t be possible that there is that much honey available day in day out in every supermarket in the land if the sad state of the bees is considered.

The honey is from China in the main and is corn syrup perhaps with some colouring added. Or it is a bit of poorly produced honey with some corn syrup added.

It isn’t easy to spot either, the only true way for a shopper to tell is when the honey is old and it hasn’t crystallised because true honey crystallises and goes hard. But that is difficult to tell because if there is a little bit of honey in the corn syrup mix, that could crystallise which would fool you. Most proper real honeys totally and annoyingly go hard.

So here is where I bought some true honey (so they say): OliveOlogy and I can’t wait for it to arrive.

This site will tell you all about the nature of bees and how to keep them and have to say I quite fancy it.

Perhaps we should all be keeping bees, maybe taking a little of their honey for ourselves but leaving stacks more for their own food to survive the winter. Bees should not be sugar fed, they should be left their own honey.

Why with all the standards in place isn’t what is in the honey, declared on the label?

UPDATE:

An experiment
As the only way to tell if Honey is genuine is you have to wait for it to crystallise I took all the honeys out of the cupboard. Embarrassingly I found 5 different brands. The Greek Honey I had just bought, Tesco’s organic honey my husband had bought and some Rowse honey I didn’t like and there at the back of the cupboard some Hilltop honey I’d forgotten we had.  So I have put a spoonful of each of the honeys in a bowl with a spoon with the honey pot behind the bowl so I know which is which.

Taste wise

The Greek honey tasted of honey and has a delicious flavour and a cloudy appearance, the Hilltop Honey (non organic) simply tasted very sweet with no flavour and a very clear appearance.  Rowse’s Organic honey has a very strong vanilla flavour and is very clear. Rowse non organic and Tesco’s Organic honey simply tasted sweet and both are very clear.

my experiment

my experiment

Day 1

All the spoons glided across the honey when the spoon was moved and none of the bowls moved.

Day 3

The two Rowse honeys, one organic and one not, and the Tescos organic honey are still so loose that when you move the spoon it glides easily through the honey and the bowls don’t move. The Hilltop honey and the Greek honey bowls are both dragged across the kitchen surface when you try to move the spoon. The Greek honey being the thickest.

I wasn’t expecting any results after just a few days because it can take quite a while for runny honey to crystallise. But my money is on the Greek Honey being 100% Pure non-pasteurised Honey. All the others may have some sugar added in the form of corn syrup and the bees may have been sugar fed in the winter resulting in very sweet bland tasting fake honey.

The purpose of bees is to pollinate our plants and food sources, not for us to be consuming all their food sources so that they die in the winter.

I was very ignorant about the plight of bees – not only being killed by bee killing pesticides but being starved as well.

UPDATE – June 2018

Eventually I put the honey bowls in the fridge to ‘help’ them harden. After a week, there was no real difference to any of them except that the two I suspect of truly being REAL honey were much much firmer but not crystallised.

I’ve given up the experiment, which was no experiment at all really. Hilltop honey says it is raw so it probably is. The Greek honey also said it was raw – so it probably is too as these two did get thicker and stickier and more solid over time. The others – Rowse and Tescos organic honeys? I do not know but they did remain as runny and loose as they were when I first bought them.

So there we are and there we have it.

 

 

 

3 thoughts on “Fake honey – really?

  1. Thanks Marianne I had no idea about this …we need to know all the ways to protect bees (and ultimately us) for the future! I will be taking great care about honey in future.
    Also going to look into testing my Manuka honey (tea tree) Can I post it on here?

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