How to distinguish real honey from fake (full review).

Honey is very useful for colds, it improves immunity and normalizes metabolism. Children especially need this product, it helps them resist diseases and improves brain activity. But all this applies only to natural honey. And recently, a lot of fakes have appeared on the market, which are difficult to identify at first glance. Those who care about their health should know how to distinguish real honey from fake honey.

When purchasing at the market, you may come across not only a product diluted with sugar syrup, but also an outright counterfeit. Unscrupulous manufacturers may add molasses, gelatin, starch and even sawdust to increase volume.

Honey can be faked even at the production stage. Beekeepers feed bees sugar syrup, and they produce a product that contains almost no nutrients. It's just a sweet treat. You need to know how to distinguish real honey from fake honey so as not to harm your health. To make more profit, some unscrupulous farmers pull out the honeycombs very early. Honey has not yet had time to ripen and remains useless.

How to check if honey is real when purchasing it? At room temperature, a fake can be identified by the consistency of the product. Try stirring the honey - it should not foam or have any impurities. If you scoop a little from the jar onto a spoon and swirl it, you will see the quality of the product. Immature and

it will drain quickly. A real healing product should be viscous, roll onto a spoon, and if you want to pour it, it should not break into drops. A thin, even stream forms a small hill on the surface.

Only fresh honey can be liquid. After 3-6 months it should harden and crystallize. Usually in stores it is heated to sell it and it remains liquid for a long time. But such a product does not have any beneficial properties.

How to distinguish real honey from fake honey by taste? For it to be healing, it must contain only plant nectar. That's why real honey smells like flowers and has a slightly bitter taste. If you swallow it, then

you will feel your throat sore. A fake will simply be a sweet delicacy, often mixed with foreign odors and tastes.

If you have already purchased the product and brought it home, how can you distinguish real honey from fake honey? The easiest way is to stir it in water. It should dissolve completely. And to check if there are any impurities, drop a little iodine into the solution. If it turns blue, then there was starch or flour there. Chalk impurities react to vinegar - it will foam and hiss.

How to distinguish real honey from fake? Dilute it with water and add a little ammonia. If molasses is added to it, the solution will turn brown and a precipitate will form. An easier way is to drip honey onto paper. It should not be absorbed and spread over the surface.

It is very important to know how to identify real honey for those who buy it for treatment. It must have bactericidal properties, so a piece of food placed in honey should not spoil for a long time. If it has turned sour, foam and signs of fermentation have appeared, then the product is not suitable for treatment.

Many people only know about honey that it is a very healthy product, it is made by bees and collected by beekeepers. And the fact that there is a lot of honey in Russia, so everyone and everyone is selling it. In many retail outlets this bee product is sold with the label “natural”, which is not always true.

Very often on store shelves you can find a lot of fake honey or honey diluted with various impurities. So how to distinguish natural honey from fake?

What should real honey be like?

Honey with a liquid or thick consistency is natural, freshly pumped, and not overheated. Real bee honey has a pleasant floral aroma. Liquid honey is clover, fireweed or white acacia honey. This happens in July-August, immediately after pumping. After two months, the honey begins to crystallize.
Crystallized is real honey. Crystallization is a natural process that does not in any way affect the content of useful substances in honey. The exception is acacia or chestnut honey, these are varieties that do not crystallize at all; heather honey, bypassing crystallization, turns into jelly.

Attention! It must be remembered that adulterated honey does not crystallize.

Fake honey

Fraudsters prepare counterfeits in various ways. For example, sugar is hydrolyzed with acetic or citric acid. Or watermelon, grape or melon juices are evaporated, bringing to the desired thickness. The resulting mixture is very reminiscent of honey in smell and color, in the presence of fructose and glucose in it, but it does not contain the active components that natural honey has.

When purchasing, be sure to pay attention to the packaging. As a rule, when packaged in small quantities, honey heats up above 40 degrees and loses its beneficial properties.

You need to be very careful when purchasing honey with pollen. This is a very expensive product. Pollen retains its beneficial properties for only six months. And no one knows what pollen is added to honey. It is correct to buy pollen separately, granular, not diluted in any way.

When creating adulterations, components such as sugar, molasses, chalk, starch, flour, gelatin, etc. are added to honey to increase the mass of the product.

Overheated natural honey that has lost its nutritional value is considered counterfeit.

Unripe honey is also not real honey. The maturity of honey is related to its viscosity and moisture. Unripe honey foams - this is a characteristic sign of the presence of excess water in its composition. Such honey quickly sours, its taste deteriorates, and its nutritional qualities decrease. In mature honey, the water content should be no more than 20%.

How to distinguish honey from fake?

Folk methods for distinguishing natural honey from fake:

First, dip a spoon or wooden stick into the liquid honey, rotate it a little and lift it up. If the honey is real, then it will stretch as a long thread, which, when broken, will form a turret. The fake one will just run and drip.
Secondly, you can recognize real honey by its smell. Fake honey has no smell, but real honey has a pleasant floral-meadow aroma.
Thirdly, a remarkable indicator of the naturalness of a bee product is taste. If the honey is real, then it irritates the mucous membrane of the pharynx and causes soreness. After swallowing, irritation increases slightly. If honey is diluted with sucrose, then this sensation is reduced and if completely adulterated, it is completely absent.
Fourthly, you need to know what honey should be like at different times of the year. If liquid is sold in the spring, then it is a fake or it has been heat-treated.
Another way to distinguish real honey: stir a spoonful of honey in boiled water. Real, genuine honey will dissolve completely in water, a sediment will remain from the diluted honey, or a white film will appear on the surface of the water.
Sixth method. To select ripe honey and not confuse it with unripe, you can wrap liquid honey on a spoon and lift it a little while continuing to rotate. In this case, unripe honey will flow from the spoon, and mature honey will spool up.
How else can you tell if honey is real? Visually. Fake honey is transparent, while natural honey is cloudy due to the presence of proteins and becomes even more cloudy during crystallization.
Another way to find out whether honey is fake or not is to evaluate crystallization. If, when the crystals fall out in the jar, delamination is visible and uneven layer-by-layer crystallization occurs, then this is a fake.
Honey is often diluted with starch. There is a simple way to distinguish real bee honey from diluted or fake one: dissolve honey in water and add a few drops of iodine. If there is an admixture of starch, then it is fake.

Conclusion

Still, traditional methods cannot give an accurate idea of whether the product on the shelf is really a natural beekeeping product or a fake. Only laboratory tests can tell you how to correctly distinguish honey from counterfeit honey. There are currently about thirty of them. These are various tests for the presence of sucrose in honey, reactions to dextrins, qualitative reactions to the presence of gelatin and many other studies.

On August 14, Rus' celebrated the First Savior, which was also called Honey Day. By this day, the honeycombs should be filled, and beekeepers begin to take out the contents. In churches, from that day on, it was allowed to eat it - they made honey gingerbreads, pancakes with poppy seeds and honey, gingerbread cookies and other baked goods. Honey fairs in Russia begin in May, when beekeepers begin to extract the first honey. On beautiful counters lined with a variety of jars, you can find honey for any, even the most demanding taste. True, sometimes buyers are faced with the fact that for a lot of money they bought not a “natural product”, but a natural product, and they can only hope that this honey is not dangerous to health.

For an unscrupulous manufacturer, the most important thing is to increase the mass of the product or even mix in some substance that should resemble honey as closely as possible. Most often, sugar syrup is added to honey. In this way, you can increase the mass and make unripe honey sweet. In addition, you can add starch, beet or starch syrup, invert sugar, sucrose - as much as your imagination allows. We have collected tips on how to distinguish real honey from fake honey at home.

1) Test for ductility Natural honey is by no means watery. It should be viscous. Warm the honey to about 20 degrees, stirring with a spoon. Then take out the spoon and start swirling it - if it is a normal consistency, it should curl onto the spoon and not run off. Then watch how the honey flows back into the container - it should slowly form a slide, forming bubbles on the surface.

2) Check with a newspaper Drop a little honey on a piece of paper (a piece of newspaper or toilet paper) - the paper should remain dry. If the honey spreads and forms a wet trail, it means there is water in it.

3) Test on bread Another test for the presence of water that should not be there can be done using a piece of bread. You just need to dip it in honey for 10 minutes and then remove it. In natural high-quality honey, the bread should harden, but in fake honey it will soften.

4) Iodine test In order to detect impurities in honey, you will need to conduct a simple experiment. Dilute a little honey with water and add a drop of iodine. If the liquid turns blue, then it contains starch or flour.

5) Check with vinegar essence To do this, you also need to make a honey solution using warm water. If the solution sizzles when adding vinegar essence, it contains chalk.

6) Checking with lapis pencil For the next experiment you will need a lapis pencil, which can be bought at a pharmacy for less than 150 rubles. Make a 5-10% solution of honey and immerse a pencil in it. If a white precipitate forms, sugar has been added to the honey.

7) Check with a chemical pencil To determine whether there are foreign liquids in honey, take a chemistry pencil and paper with you to the fair. Smear a small amount of honey on the paper and try to write something through the layer of honey with a pencil. If after a few seconds you see an inscription or streaks of blue-violet color, it means that water or syrup has been added to the treat.

8) Wire test Take a stainless steel wire, heat it on fire (you can use a regular lighter) and immerse it in honey. If the adhesive mass sticks to the wire, then it is a fake. If the honey is natural, the wire will remain clean. And in general, as in the sensational case with flammable cottage cheese in St. Petersburg (journalists checked the quality of “natural” cottage cheese bought in a store and found that it could burn for more than 10 minutes), honey can be tasted and set on fire - you never know what it was made from . Good honey simply will not burn. Counterfeits may change color, such as turning brown, melting, or emitting a caramel or chemical smell.

8) Check for sediment Stir a spoonful of honey in a glass of warm tea and leave for an hour. If after this there is sediment left at the bottom of the glass or on the surface, the quality of your purchase leaves much to be desired.

9) Check with ammonia Mix a little honey with water in a ratio of one to two. Then add a few drops of ammonia there and shake the resulting solution. If it turns brown, it means that starch syrup was mixed into the honey.

10) Smell test Natural honey is always very fragrant. If it has no smell, then most likely it is not natural.

Before you go shopping for honey for the whole year, take a moment to find out what varieties there are and what color they differ in - this can also play into your hands in your search for natural honey. For example, buckwheat honey should be brown, floral honey should be golden yellow, linden honey should be amber, and mustard honey should be creamy yellow. The unnaturally white color of honey is a cause for concern, because some producers do not take out bees to collect nectar, but simply feed the unfortunate creatures sugar. The resulting honey, of course, does not have any valuable properties.

HOW NOT TO SPOILE HONEY

When shopping is done, remember that honey should not be stored in metal containers. The fact is that the acids contained in honey can oxidize and cause the valuable product to lose some of its beneficial properties and can even lead to poisoning.

If you like to drink tea with honey, do not add honey to boiling water. Already at 60 degrees, the structure of honey disintegrates and it loses its properties. Over time, honey inevitably becomes thick and cloudy, so if honey purchased in the summer remains liquid and transparent until winter, it is not natural. If the honey thickens at the bottom but remains liquid at the top, this means that the honey was collected immature, and such honey can be stored for only a few months.

HEALING PROPERTIES OF DIFFERENT HONEY

Linden honey used as an antipyretic, it has diaphoretic properties. In addition, it is bactericidal and promotes expectoration of sputum.

Buckwheat honey It is especially valued in the treatment and prevention of anemia, with hypo- and avitaminosis, and is useful for people predisposed to cardiovascular diseases. This honey has a beneficial effect on blood quality and restores the body well after blood loss.

Chestnut honey good for disorders of the digestive system and, like buckwheat, for problems with the cardiovascular system. In addition, it has an antimicrobial effect.

Fireweed honey useful for the prevention and treatment of colds. It contains a lot of vitamin C.

Flower honey women need to eat. It is useful for the female reproductive system and is used for the prevention and treatment of gynecological diseases. For erosion, women are recommended to use sainfoin honey. And during the period of breastfeeding, breastfeeding is useful sweet clover honey, which promotes milk production. This type of honey also has anti-inflammatory, soothing and analgesic effects.

Chestnut honey useful for men with potency problems. In general, men are advised to buy dark and bitter varieties of honey, for example, buckwheat.

Honey with beebread (pollen compacted by bees) has a pronounced immunostimulating effect. It restores immunity well, including after illnesses and operations.

Meadow herb honey helps with insomnia and headaches.

Maria Al-Salkhani

Natural honey can only be liquid for a month after it was collected. Honey collection lasts from the end of July to the end of September. If you are offered liquid honey in winter, it is most likely unnatural. By this time, high-quality real honey should thicken and begin to crystallize.

2. Check if the honey is foaming

If honey foams on the surface, it means that fermentation processes are occurring in it. It begins when the volume of water in honey exceeds 20%. This honey is definitely unnatural.

3. Smell the honey

Natural honey always has a characteristic smell. If the honey does not smell like anything, it was produced artificially.

4. Check if the honey is separating

Take a close look at the container with honey and check whether the mass is homogeneous. If the honey seems denser at the bottom of the jar and thinner at the top, it is fake. Most likely, the manufacturer added an impurity. Often, unscrupulous manufacturers put a mixture of semolina and molasses at the bottom of the jar.

5. Ignore the color

Color is not an indicator of the quality of honey; it can only indicate its variety. For example, buckwheat and cherry honey are usually dark brown, while acacia honey is light. Other types of honey can be dark amber, amber, light yellow, or even almost white.

Probably every person has heard about the benefits of beekeeping products. Such natural gifts can heal the body, prevent a variety of diseases and pathologies, and also treat some of them. Medicines based on bee products can be purchased at any pharmacy or prepared at home.

And honey is rightfully considered the most popular of them - a tasty and very healthy delicacy. But, unfortunately, today it is very difficult to find really high-quality honey. Therefore, the topic of our conversation today will be honey fakes and ways to identify them. Let's talk about how to distinguish fake honey from real honey.

Counterfeit honey can be purchased anywhere – from resellers and producers. Moreover, the average consumer will not even be able to distinguish them from each other. Let's try to understand not only the differences between real honey, but also the variety of existing fakes.

How is natural honey counterfeited?

Current fakes can be divided into three groups:

Natural with the addition of foreign substances designed to increase the overall volume and density of the mass;
Products obtained from a mixture of sugar and water, with the addition of dyes and flavors;
Sugar.

Natural honey: signs of a quality product

Before purchasing honey of a particular variety, it is useful to read its detailed description in a reference book or other specialized literature. Each variety has certain qualities: appearance and color, aroma and taste, consistency.

Appearance, color

Pure honey is always transparent and unclouded. Its viscosity can be studied by lowering a thin knitting needle or stick into a bowl, following which it will stretch as a long thread, and when interrupted, it will drop entirely, forming a “tower” on the surface of the product. The fake will behave more like glue, flowing and dripping from the knitting needle, and may even create splashes.

Natural honey can be distinguished by its thickness, which must correspond to the varietal characteristics. At a temperature of 20°C, a high-quality product, when wound on a spoon, is wound like a ribbon in a long strip and at a certain moment is interrupted. Its structure is quite delicate; when rubbed in the palm of your hand, it is absorbed into the skin.

High-quality flower honey contains no more than 5% sucrose, honeydew honey – no more than 10%. Increased amounts of it can only be determined within the walls of the laboratory. Some features of the appearance and properties of the product should alert the buyer even during a quick inspection, making them suspect a fake:

smell of stale honeycombs;
unexpressed fresh taste;
the consistency is too thin for fresh honey or sticky, sticky and thick for a product that has been stored for a long time.

Consistency

Honey purchased in winter is usually hardened. If a product remains plastic during this season, it most often means it has been diluted or heated. There are varieties that do not shrink longer than others, but they are difficult to distinguish from fakes:

May honey contains a large amount of fructose, so it does not sugar for a long time. This is the earliest variety, one of the most beneficial for human health, but it is this one that often turns out to be a fake.
Acacia honey also contains a significant proportion of fructose and water, so it can maintain plasticity for up to 1-2 years.
Greek honey is of great value; pine and thyme varieties are especially popular. They thicken only six months after collection, and under certain conditions they can retain a liquid consistency for up to 1.5 years.
Chestnut honey is a viscous and dark variety that takes 6-12 months to shrink. During long-term storage, it forms increasingly larger crystals and also begins to separate.

Liquid consistency is characteristic of unripe honey, which flows from the cutlery without forming a viscous thread. It is pumped out in case of a shortage of honeycombs; it is not complete and biologically active, contains too much water and cannot be stored for a long time. Fermentation processes begin quickly in it, since the product is not sufficiently enriched with sucrose and enzymes.

Determining the quality of honey by external signs

You can determine whether the honey in front of you is fake or real without laboratory tests. Our advice regarding the characteristic external signs of bee nectar will prevent you from getting into trouble:

Taste. First of all, try the product. If it dissolves without a trace, no strong sugar crystals remain on the tongue, and the tart aftertaste hurts your throat, then it is of high quality. Moreover, don’t be shy and take it out with a spoon from the very bottom (there may be molasses at the bottom of the counterfeit jar). And if the seller is against it, it’s better to avoid such honey.
Smell. Real nectar will definitely have a characteristic fragrant floral aroma. The fake one has no smell.
Crystallization. If you see large and hard crystals in candied honey, then most likely it is counterfeit, fermented by bees from sugar syrup. In a natural product, the crystals should be small.
Liquid state. Buyers prefer the product in this form, although the crystallized one does not lose its beneficial properties at all. But if there is a demand for liquid honey, it means that scammers organize supply by melting (melting) old honey. It will no longer contain useful substances, only pure glucose. It loses its healing properties at temperatures above 37 degrees, so, by the way, there is no particular health benefit to drinking hot tea with honey rather than sugar. Only acacia, heather and chestnut nectar are candied later than all other varieties and can remain liquid throughout the year (they contain more fructose). Any other real honey cannot be liquid in winter. If you see such a product on sale, it means that it has either been melted, or it is adulterated (fermented by bees not from nectar, but from sugar syrup or honeydew). If you have a liquid product sealed in a honeycomb, you can be sure that it has not been overheated. True, they are still not immune from counterfeiting (the bees could have been fed syrup).
Transparency, presence of sediment and delamination. Honey, of course, is transparent while it is in a liquid state. But if it is super transparent, and you can even see the bottom of the jar through it, and the nectar also has an amber tint, having a bright shine and caramel taste, then most likely you are dealing with an overheated product. Acacia honey can be transparent and slightly cloudy, all other varieties are either transparent (still liquid) or crystallized. If there is sediment or stratification in it (the substance at the bottom is denser than at the top), then this is definitely due to foreign impurities. This happens if, for example, scammers put molasses mixed with semolina at the bottom of the jar and poured real honey on top.
Impurities. In a natural product, if you look closely, you can see pollen and wax particles. Buy this honey with peace of mind. But if blades of grass and parts of bees’ bodies float in it, the same wax in fairly large pieces, this means that either the nectar is natural, and the seller is very sloppy, not to say unscrupulous, or he deliberately added all this garbage to give credibility to his fake or low-quality product. In any case, it is better to refrain from purchasing.
Availability of foam. This kind of honey is not worth buying; it has begun to ferment or was pumped out immature. In a high-quality product there should be no foam.
Fluidity. A good product does not have high fluidity, but a sour, unripe product (it is poorly stored, turns sour quickly) or diluted with honeydew - yes, because it contains a large amount of water. It is because of this that a counterfeit product, if dropped onto low-grade paper that absorbs moisture well (for example, newspaper or toilet paper), will spread over it or even seep through, forming wet spots around it. Low-quality honey cannot be rolled onto a spoon; it will drip, making splashes and bubbles on the surface of the rest of the substance. But the real one, if you dip a clean wooden stick into it and then lift it up, it will be followed by a long, uninterrupted thread, which, when broken, will fall down intact, forming a slide.
Absorbency. If you try to rub a drop of honey between your fingers, the natural one will be absorbed into the skin without any residue, while the fake one will leave a rolling lump on your fingers.
Weight. An 800 ml jar should hold a product weighing 1 kg. If not, it means it has a lot of water (i.e. it is immature or diluted). And in a liter jar by weight there should be at least 1 kg 400 g of bee nectar.
Healing. Motherwort honey is soothing, and raspberry and linden honey are useful for colds. But being at the counter, you won’t be able to check these qualities. But if at home you feel the corresponding effect (for example, raspberry should definitely give you a fever), then return to the seller and stock up on such goods for future use. Better yet, take the coordinates of this beekeeper so as not to miss the opportunity to buy a worthy product in the future.
Packed honey. It happens that the market sells the product in pieces. That is, it is so compacted that a jar is no longer needed to store it, and even cutting such a monolith with a knife is quite difficult. It is clear that this is not a product of the current year, and perhaps not of the past. If you trust the beekeeper, then you can buy such honey, but, naturally, it is cheaper than fresher honey. But it’s better not to take a packed one from unverified sellers. The fact is that honey absorbs smell and moisture. If stored improperly, it may contain unknown and non-useful components.
Honeydew honey. If you set out to find such a product or, on the contrary, do not want to buy it, then remember that it is different in that it does not have the usual honey smell, its color is brownish, dark, sometimes even greenish. Its taste is very sweet, but there is no characteristic nectar taste. Honeydew honey remains liquid for a long time, it is hygroscopic and therefore is poorly stored and quickly sours.