Sugar for my Honey?
So what was that about honey again?
Yesterday I spent some five hours at a small event at the local mall talking about bees and selling honey. The municipal government wants to encourage environmental thinking in its citizens and apparently, bees do that. So there I was, with a couple of associates, a small demonstration hive with live bees, various merchandise and a few different kinds of honey.
Now, when you’re participating in events like this, present in some sort of expert capacity and informing people about something you have plenty of experience with, there’s a rule that says that a certain portion of your audience know more about your own bees and honey than you do. And they love to tell you about it. This wouldn’t be too difficult to deal with if it wasn’t for the fact that some of them consistently, every year, accuse us beekeepers of putting table sugar in our honey.
One particularly grumpy man pointed his hand at our honey jars and said, “That one contains 10 % sugar cubes, that one contains 50 % sugar cubes, that one contains 90 % sugar cubes.” (He seemed to judge them by runniness, where the newly extracted, uncrystallized honey was the least tampered with; the solid, fragrant linden honey was the biggest villain; and the pale gold, creamy summer honey was somewhere in the middle.) When we unanimously and rather tersely stated that no, we don’t put any fracking sugar in our fracking honey because that would be illegal, he ignored us and blurted, “Oh yes, I know, I bought this jar of honey and two days later there were sugar lumps in it!”
Uh-huh, that’s conclusive evidence, that is.
This is what I told those who actually listened to us when they asked if the honey was “real”: Honey contains two kinds of sugar, glucose and fructose. How much of each depends on which flowers the bees have gathered nectar from. Fructose will always remain fluid, whereas glucose, once the honey is extracted from the hive, eventually crystallizes. How quickly this happens and how hard the honey gets depends on the relative proportions of the two sugars, as well as temperature and other factors. For example, rapeseed honey has a notoriously high glucose content and sometimes crystallizes in the hive before extraction - pure, it can get so hard you have to carve it out of the jar with a knife.
If you leave the honey unattended between extraction and crystallization, the glucose will form large, lumpy crystals at the bottom of a solution of fructose. The honey is essentially inedible at this point, at least it is considered such in Sweden. Which is why Swedish beekeepers never sell uncrystallized honey, but always take care to make sure the honey crystallizes evenly, by stirring or other methods. We desire fully crystallized honey that is completely free from crystals so large that they can actually be felt on the tongue - if the honey feels like sand or gravel on the tongue it’s sub-par.
Now, the area I live in has a very high proportion of immigrants. I haven’t seen any figures for a long time but it’s well over 50%. Most of them are from the middle east, a fair few from south america and a minority from africa and far east. In many of these parts of the world, there are several species of plants that yield honey with such a high fructose content that it never crystallizes (acacia and orange being the most common ones). Hence many of these people are used to honey always being clear and runny, and I suspect get rather suspicious when they see our opaque and creamy-to-solid honey. We have also heard anecdotes from various countries about how common it is for beekeepers to cheat and either mix sugar in their extracted honey, or give the bees sugar and then extract that from the hive.
In Sweden, doing something like that would be completely unthinkable. A beekeeper caught cheating in such a way would be immediately ostracised, if not lynched. We may not be that many, but we are extremely proud of our all-natural product and the fact that it isn’t necessary to add or do anything to it to improve the taste or increase shelf-life. (At the blogmeet earlier this week I was asked if we pasteurise our honey. I was really confused - firstly I don’t understand why it would be needed, and secondly heating the honey ruins it!)
27 sept 2008: In this post I explain what to do with unevenly crystallised honey.