can sugar syrup become honey?

[limyw]

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?

[Michael Bush]

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.

[madscientist]

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

[Michael Bush]

>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.