To me it sounds like “baby” in the video. I’m glad I’m not the only one whose ears get those two confused! (“Baby” makes more sense in both songs because it’s not gender-specific.)
I heard it as ‘honey’, but my memory is backwards, in that I remember it as, “Hello my honey, hello by baby, hello my ragtime gal.” Honey comes first. Looks like I was wrong about that.
The cartoon is too ingrained in my memory for me to get it wrong.
It’s wight up there with, “Kill da Wabbit, kill da Wabbit!”
I knew it was honey. With so many people thinking it is “darling,” it makes me wonder if there was a version with that lyric. I don’t really see why “honey” would be misremembered as “darlin’.”
Alternatively, perhaps the word "darlin’ " is used later in the song
That’s also where I know it from, but my brain still says darling. It feels much easier. I think it might be that, like gdave said, it fits better linguistically with the way I use darling and honey.
Sugar came to mind first and then I doubted myself and thought, “Maybe honey?” Darling didn’t cross my mind.
this song and “is you is or is you aint my baby?” from tom and jerry are the only two songs i have ever looked up to see if they were real songs …
As gdave says, for me it’s darlin’. No G. And it’s definitely Michigan J. Frog that I remember singing.
My mom always sang it “Hello my honey, hello my darling…”. No baby anywhere.
I don’t know how to answer the poll…
Having seen the aforementioned cartoon and its various parodies hundreds of times, of course it’s “honey.”
Curiously, I don’t believe I’ve ever actually heard any other version of the song. Having just now looked it up on YouTube, doesn’t sound right. The frog version is the “genuine” one to me. 
I’m pretty sure Tom Hanks sings “hello my baby, hello my darling“ during the altermate, happy ending to Big.
Same here. And I must sing it in his voice.
Another Mandela Effect is people remembering hearing the frog’s name in One Froggy Evening (he didn’t have one). The name “Michigan J. Frog” wasn’t created until someone pressed Chuck Jones for one 20+ years later. In fact, the first time he was named (in linking sequences on The Bugs Bunny Show) in the early 1960s, his name was “Enrico”.
Bill Roberts
I got “honey,” but I had to think about it for a moment. I didn’t even consider “darling”—that sounds wrong to me.
Are old Warner Brothers Cartoons still on TV? They used to be on in the morning and in the afternoon when I was a kid. Ah, the old channel 11. I saw One Froggy Evening, the Citizen Kane of cartoons, multiple times as a child. My daughter has no idea who Michigan J. Frog is.
HBO Max has sucked up most of the streaming rights to those cartoons.
Honey, and while I’d like to credit Michigan J. Frog, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the baby xenomorph in Spaceballs is always the first thing I think of when I hear that tune.
ETA: and on reading the thread, I see that at least a couple of you are also paragons of good taste.
Similar to Gossamer, one of Bugs’ enemies.
Not named in most appearances, he was called Rudolph in “Water Water Every Hare” and finally, Gossamer in “Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24½th Century” decades later in 1980.