What is honey?

The short definition

Honey is a food made by bees from the nectar of flowers, or from honeydew — the sugary excretion of sap-feeding insects. The bees collect it, add enzymes to it, evaporate most of its water, and store it in wax cells which they cap when it is ready. Nothing is added and nothing but water is taken away.

That definition matters legally as well as descriptively. Under the EU honey directive and the Codex Alimentarius standard, honey is what bees make from those sources and nothing else. Adding sugar, syrup, water, flavouring or colour makes the product something other than honey, and the standards are written so that the question has an answer rather than an opinion.

What is actually in it

Around eighty per cent of honey is sugar and around seventeen per cent is water. The sugars are principally fructose and glucose, in a ratio that varies by floral source and determines almost everything about how the honey behaves in a jar.

That final one per cent is where the interest lies. The sugars are much the same in every honey; the trace compounds are what make acacia taste of almost nothing and buckwheat taste of a barnyard.

Why it keeps

Four properties act together, and none of them is preservative in the ordinary sense. The water in honey is bound to sugar rather than available to microbes, giving a water activity around 0.5 to 0.6 against the 0.9 or so most bacteria need. It is acidic, at pH 3.5 to 4.5. Its sugar concentration draws water out of any cell that lands in it. And glucose oxidase, an enzyme the bees add, slowly generates hydrogen peroxide.

This is why honey is stable and not why it is magical. Dilute it and every one of those defences fails at once.

Honey, honeydew and the things that are not honey

• Floral honey comes from nectar, produced by the flower to attract pollinators.
• Honeydew honey comes from the excretions of aphids and scale insects feeding on plant sap. It is legally honey, it is generally darker and less sweet, and it is analytically distinguishable by electrical conductivity.
• Sugar-fed honey — where colonies were fed syrup during a flow — is adulteration and is detectable by isotope testing.
• Blended honey mixes crops or countries. That is legal and normal, and the label should say so.
• Flavoured or infused honey is honey plus something else and is not a monofloral.

What decides how a honey tastes

Floral source above all. A honey is the chemical signature of whatever the bees were working, and a colony that spent a fortnight on lime blossom produces something entirely different from one that spent it on buckwheat. Beyond that, geography, weather during the flow, how ripe the honey was when taken, and how it has been handled since all leave marks.

What does not decide it, contrary to a persistent belief, is the bee. The subspecies of honey bee makes a difference to how much honey arrives and almost none to what it tastes like.