Can bee honey be made or synthesized artifically?

Just wondering. All those tens of thousands of worker bee hours in a kilogram of honey are to be appreciated. Can food engineers make a convincing fake honey or can you make real pollen/nectar based honey sans bees.

Also, does any other insect make a nectar/pollen based “honey” like bees do?

You decide.

I’ve got no expert knowledge of this, but it seems to me from what I’ve read that natural honey is the result of collecting and drying plant nectars (with maybe a little assist rom bee secretions). The hardest part is collectin all of that raw nectar which is, after all, secreted in only tiny amounts by the plants. Bee can do this because they have a vast army of workers who can visit lots of flowers to gather these tiny amounts. Until we develop miniature robots capable of doing the same (like these robot flies and robot bees I’ve been hearin about lately), there’s really no practicl way to gther enough aw mterial to make the honey. Look at what a pain in the neck it already is to gather enough maple sap to make maple syrup nd maple sugar.

You would also have to duplicate the effect on nectar from enzymes in the bee’s crop, where the honey is stored on the trip from the flower to the hive.

You all know honey is bee vomit, don’t you?

I said:

…but I assume you were merely amplifying for dramatic effect.

I wonder if anyone has characterised the flavour components of honey yet, or ID-ed the other components? It would be interesting to know how easy (or difficult) it would be to synthesize from scratch.

Great thoughts bear repeating. :wink:

Hey! Bee Vomit! I’m home. What’s for dinner?

Drat. Wish I had thought of “Bee Vomit” as a user name when I was trying to come up with a good one.

Instead I’m stuck with a name no one can remember, much less spell. :rolleyes:

If we’re going to develop the technology to process nectar into honey artificially, we might as well toss in a budget extension and develop a way to synthesise the nectar (or more likely combine the whole thing into the same process. Not saying it would be easy…

On another note; what is the chief component of nectar (besides water)? is it fructose? - does a plant (say sugar beet) convert stored sucrose to fructose to make nectar? and if so, does this take place within the nectar glands themselves?

There are other insects that make honey although I think they are all from the same Hymenoptera group. IFAIK all bees make and store honey - and some of these bees are not as social as honey bees.

Some ants make honey, but store it in a very different way to bees: http://www.sasionline.org/antsfiles/pages/honeyants/honey.html.

I have tasted fructose: looks like regular granulated sucrose, very sweet and tastes a bit like honey. Of course, it could be that fructose is comercially purified from honey!

Honey is actually equivalent to invert sugar, a mixture of glucose and fructose. The two sugars are not chemically combined, but simply mixed together in equal proportions.* It has a sweetness of 1.3 on a scale where sucrose is 1.0.
*Some honeys may have slightly different percentages of the two and a few honeys have been found with sucrose as a component. Sucrose is a chemical combination of the simple sugars glucose and fructose.

There has to be more to it than simply mixing a couple of sugars! Honey is brown, which the sugars are not. Honey has flavorings from its sources – they identify “clover honey” and other honeys, and connoisseurs claim to be able to tell the difference. Honey can even have toxic constituents (!) (Read the article “Mad Honey” by Adrienne Mayor in Archaeology.

Yes, there are certainly flavorings in honey. But the sugar content of honey is extremely simple and basic, invert sugar, nothing more. Google honey invert sugar.

http://www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/19980208/03955494.html

http://www.sugarindia.com/faq.htm

#1 Welcome to the boards.

#2 Isn’t the word spelled Ixitxachitl? Whence the extra L ?

#3- According to the text I’m currently consulting "Ixitxachitl is both singular and plural; it is properly pronounced ish-it-SHACH-itl "

#4-Don’t worry, quite a few Dopers will get the reference.