# Did honey used to have a higher fructose content?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [December 30, 2012, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601 "2012-12-30T21:25:08Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/1 "2012-12-30T21:25:08Z")
The [Wikipedia article on honey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey#Nutrition) states that it typically consists of:
[ul][li]Fructose: 38.2%[/li][li]Glucose: 31.3%[/li][li]Maltose: 7.1%[/li][li]Sucrose: 1.3%[/li][li]Higher sugars: 1.5%[/ul][/li]… with the rest being water, ash, and “other”.
However, my mom swears up and down that, in her youth in Girl Scouts (in the1940s), she had information about honey which stated that it consisted almost **entirely** of fructose.
When I pointed out the Wikipedia statistics, my wife butted in with, “You’re both right. It used to be higher in fructose, but then beekeepers started feeding high fructose corn syrup to their bees, which changed the sugars ratio.”
I’ve know that beekeepers have been using HFCS for some time now, but I’d never heard that it had such a high impact on the chemical composition of the honey. Do bees that _aren’t_ fed HFCS, and which get all their food from flower pollen and nectar they collect, produce honey with a significantly higher ratio of fructose in it? Do these old statistics my mom harped about having learned actually exist?
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### Author:  [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 9:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/2 "2012-12-30T21:38:41Z")
> [@tracer](#):
>
> I’ve know that beekeepers have been using HFCS for some time now, but I’d never heard that it had such a high impact on the chemical composition of the honey. Do bees that _aren’t_ fed HFCS, and which get all their food from flower pollen and nectar they collect, produce honey with a significantly higher ratio of fructose in it? Do these old statistics my mom harped about having learned actually exist?
I think you mean that [honey produced by bees is watered down with HFCS](http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/), and not bees are fed HFCS.
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### Author:  [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/3 "2012-12-30T21:44:52Z")
> [@Duckster](#):
>
> I think you mean that [honey produced by bees is watered down with HFCS](http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/11/tests-show-most-store-honey-isnt-honey/), and not bees are fed HFCS.
No, I meant bees are fed HFCS:
> **[Beekeeping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apiculture#Animal_welfare)**
>
> Beekeeping (or apiculture) is the maintenance of bee colonies, commonly in artificial beehives. Honey bees in the genus Apis are the most commonly kept species but other honey producing bees such as Melipona stingless bees are also kept. Beekeepers (or apiarists) keep bees to collect honey and other products of the hive: beeswax, propolis, bee pollen, and royal jelly. Other sources of beekeeping income include pollination of crops, raising queens, and production of package bees for sale. Bee hive...
> **[High-fructose corn syrup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup#Apiculture)**
>
> High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), also known as glucose–fructose, isoglucose, and glucose–fructose syrup, is a sweetener made from corn starch. As in the production of conventional corn syrup, the starch is broken down into glucose by enzymes. To make HFCS, the corn syrup is further processed by D-xylose isomerase to convert some of its glucose into fructose. HFCS was first marketed in the early 1970s by the Clinton Corn Processing Company, together with the Japanese Agency of Industrial Sci As ...
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### Author:  [@Duckster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Duckster)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/4 "2012-12-30T22:05:52Z")
Thanks for the clarification. I guess the almighty dollar is more important than the natural sustainability of bee colonies. I wonder how much of the colony collapse is attributed to artificial “feeding” of bees. Considering the critical functions of pollination of food crops by bees, will we all see the corresponding food crop failures in time?
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### Author:  [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/5 "2012-12-30T22:08:58Z")
> [@Duckster](#):
>
> Thanks for the clarification. I guess the almighty dollar is more important than the natural sustainability of bee colonies. I wonder how much of the colony collapse is attributed to artificial “feeding” of bees. Considering the critical functions of pollination of food crops by bees, will we all see the corresponding food crop failures in time?
Not likely given the huge numbers of other insects and birds that also help with pollination.
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### Author:  [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 11:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/6 "2012-12-30T23:03:32Z")
Still … now that I pay a little more attention to this, it seems that the “honey used to have a different fructose percentage” argument sounds suspicious to me.
According to those articles, the reason HFCS is fed to bees is as a _substitute_ for the honey that was taken from them – and this practice of replacing the bees’ honey with other sugars is not new. The only thing “new” about the use of HFCS in this role is that the honey-replacement used to be done with plain old sugar syrup, i.e. sucrose. And sucrose molecules are just fructose bonded to glucose, in nearly the same ratio as the mixture in HFCS.
So unless the feeding of _sucrose_ to bees is a relatively new phenomenon, it’s highly unlikely that the switchover from sucrose to HFCS caused that big of a difference in the fructose ratio of the resulting honey.
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### Author:  [@Filbert](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Filbert)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2012, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/7 "2012-12-30T23:43:29Z")
I’m learning to be a beekeeper in the UK, where sucrose is normally fed as a supplement rather than HFCS- our beekeeping literature gives the same average sugar ratios as the US ones as far as I can tell.
Fructose/sucrose rations do vary, but mainly due to where the bees are collecting from (assuming it’s not adulterated later); not all flowers produce nectar with the same ratio of sugars, and some produce nectar with high levels of fructose.
Fondant (the common name for the supplementary sugar here- dunno what it’s called in the US) is only normally fed during times of shortages- usually over winter- so not much should make its way into the honey collected, which is only collected from productive colonies, most commonly in early Autumn. Fondant’s actually fairly expensive, so there’s not much profit in giving it to the bees for them to turn straight into honey, and bees themselves are not cheap enough to risk killing to save a bit of money on getting crap supplementary food.
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### Author:  [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)
#### Post date: [January 1, 2013, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/8 "2013-01-01T02:07:06Z")
Well, **this** is interesting. It’s a report from the Australian government in 2005, on the glycemic index of honey:
[https://rirdc.infoservices.com.au/downloads/05-027](https://rirdc.infoservices.com.au/downloads/05-027) (PDF file)
According to page vi of that article (page 6 of the PDF file), there was quite a bit of variation in the fructose/glucose ratio between one brand of honey and the next:
> [@](#):
>
> • The fructose contents varied from 27.5 – 52.4 g/100g of the honey amongst the varieties studied with a commercial blend (1) having the lowest and Stringybark having the highest.
> • The glucose contents varied from 20.3 – 32.9 g/100g with the same commercial blend (1) having the least but the Red gum variety having the highest.
So it seems that even among modern honeys, there’s a pretty wide margin in the amount of fructose and glucose you can get.
Interestingly, though, Commercial Blend 1 was lowest in both fructose _and_ glucose. I’m betting the commercial producers diluted it to stretch their supply.
However, even in the most extreme case, the ratio of fructose to glucose was still only 1.88 to 1. Fructose is the most _plentiful_ sugar in honey, and can even make up the _majority_ of sugars in the honey, but it’s never anywhere close to “almost entirely fructose.”
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### Author:  [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)
#### Post date: [January 1, 2013, 2:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/9 "2013-01-01T02:29:56Z")
I’ve done a lot of research into sugars and I’ve never heard of a claim that honey ever at any time was anything but a more or less 50/50 ratio of glucose and fructose\* with a bit of other - given the wide variation that any natural product has. I literally don’t think it is possible for honey to be all fructose. I don’t understand why high fructose corn syrup would _reduce_ the fructose content in honey, either. And I bet your mother doesn’t know that the real world the ratio of fructose to glucose in HFCS is almost identical to that of honey.\*\*
This smacks of urban legend, and a weird one at that. I can’t figure out what it could be referencing.
\*That is, a mechanical mixture of the two. A chemical 50/50 mixture of glucose and fructose is sucrose, which is not a component of honey.
\*\*That agave syrup that all the high-falutin’ organic products use to avoid the taint of HFCS? Guess what its composition is. Just guess.
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### Author:  [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)
#### Post date: [January 1, 2013, 2:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/10 "2013-01-01T02:48:11Z")
> [@hajario](#):
>
> Not likely given the huge numbers of other insects and birds that also help with pollination.
Different kinds of pollinators are not interchangeable. Flowers that are pollinated by honeybees are often not capable of being pollinated by other pollinators such as birds or butterflies. And honeybees, just because of their sheer numbers and high activity, are often more effective pollinators than other kinds of animals. Honeybees pollinate a large number of human crop plants, and their loss would have a significant impact.
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### Author:  [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)
#### Post date: [January 2, 2013, 10:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/did-honey-used-to-have-a-higher-fructose-content/645601/11 "2013-01-02T22:56:29Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#):
>
> \*\*That agave syrup that all the high-falutin’ organic products use to avoid the taint of HFCS? Guess what its composition is. Just guess.
Yes, but agave syrup is made from agave, which is “natural” and made by people who “care”.
HFCS, on the other hand, is made from corn, which is manufactured out of plutonium plastic by Monsanto or Citibank or something.