Why no artificial honey?

As far as I know, all honey is made by bees. Why has no one figured out how to make artificial honey? Is there something bees know that we don’t?

Artificial honey is called syrup. Sort of. We could make all kinds of things that have the sugar content of honey but it would be hard to make such a syrup with the flavors and smells of millions of flowers, which is what the bees do for us.

On the other hand, it’s easy to get bees to make “honey” out of sugar syrup and that has little or no flavor.

Invert sugar syrup

I have a jar of sugar-free honey at home (got it at Wal-Mart.) I never checked, but assume it’s artificial.

Golden syrup, which is mostly invert sugar, has properties similar to honey except in flavor. When a recipe calls for honey but I don’t want a strong honey flavor, I sometimes use golden syrup or a mixture. Golden syrup is more common in Britain than in the U.S., but you can find it here if you know where to look.

I don’t think we really need to. If you needed a sub for cooking - say, honey-baked ham - you could sub a homemade light syrup or, preferably for flavor purpose, agave syrup . For any baking purpose, you could sub agave syrup or invert sugar or just powder sugar if you futz around with the recipe.

What the queers are doing to our soil.

Even though KFC’s “honey sauce” has a smidgen of actual honey in it, the bulk of it is HFCS. Probably why they are not allowed to call it honey.

“Where to look” is in the ingredients of almost anything you buy from the grocery store. It’s not commonly sold by itself, but it’s the same stuff as HFCS.

I always find it amusing when the folks who rant loudest against the evils of HFCS, when you ask them what a good sweetener is, they’ll almost invariably point to honey. Really, honey would be bad for you, too, if you ate that much of it.

Yes. How to make all the enzymes that convert nectar into honey. It’s a little like asking, “Why haven’t humans figured out how to synthesize their own vitamin C internally instead of having to ingest it?”

Here is what I have. It’s actually darn good.

Of course you can make artificial honey. Of course, the basic syrup doesn’t taste exactly like honey, but you could add artificial honey flavor, which is commercially available.

And artificial honey is commercially available. Distinguishing real from artificial honey.

I found it amusing that they’d often talk about the horrors of HFCS vs sucrose in soda given the fact that most sodas are quite acidic and the acid breaks down the sucrose. (Into glucose/fructose which is what HFCS is made of.)

Or even more closely: It’s like asking “Why haven’t humans figured out how to make artificial milk? Why do we stll need cows?” It’s one thing to synthesize one chemical; it’s quite another to make a very complicated natural mixture.

I looked at this page and found quite a bit of nonsense. For example, it claims that real honey contains no water at all. According to some beekeeping sites I just looked at, the water content of honey is usually around 17% to 18%, and can range from 13% to 25%. Cite 1, Cite 2

The page says that natural honey is not sticky. Either this is false, or I’ve never seen natural honey.

It says pure honey will crystallize over time. Some types of honey (notably tupelo honey) are not prone to crystallization due to their high fructose content.

It says that ants will not disturb honey. I have seens ants get into spilled honey.

Huh, I thought that humans did make milk; and its not artificial. :dubious: Cows are over rated, who needs cows!:slight_smile:

Maybe so. My main point in linking to it was that artificial honey was available (and there are commercial sites for it too.)

High-fructose corn syrup and honey have very similar chemical profiles. Good enough for me.

My artificial honey got me through many lonely nights.

Was she sticky? :dubious: