Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum

BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: limyw on May 03, 2008, 11:49:50 AM

Title: can sugar syrup become honey?
Post by: limyw on May 03, 2008, 11:49:50 AM
I have a doubt: sugar syrup fed to bees, sucked and stored in honeycomb by bees, would it be inverted become honey (mainly glucose and fruitose) by enzymatic process? In short, would sucrose exist in "sugar fed honey" if it is sends for sugar profile test in laboratory?
Title: Re: can sugar syrup become honey?
Post by: Michael Bush on May 03, 2008, 12:17:46 PM
No it would not be honey from a marketing and nutritional point of view.  Honey has many things in it besides glucose and fructose and also has a little sucrose in it:

http://www.honey.com/downloads/refguide.pdf

There have been tests to distinguish stored sugar syrup from honey for a while now.

They bees will treat it like honey as far as using it for stores.
Title: Re: can sugar syrup become honey?
Post by: madscientist on September 08, 2009, 02:08:37 PM
Mr. Bush,  can you point me to some of these tests?  I'm mainly interested in one that I could do in my kitchen, or at least, rather cheaply.

Thanks
Title: Re: can sugar syrup become honey?
Post by: Michael Bush on September 08, 2009, 08:43:22 PM
>Mr. Bush,  can you point me to some of these tests?  I'm mainly interested in one that I could do in my kitchen, or at least, rather cheaply.

I don't know of any you can do in your kitchen.  The usually consist of testing for a variety of things that occur in honey and don't in syrup.  The only easy one would be pH, but of course one could change that by adding organic acids.  Honey is between 4 and 5 while syrup is 6.