1279 Honey

We all know and love honey but at some point you probably find yourself sitting at the kitchen table, holding the jar up to the light and wondering 'Whats actually in this jar?'.

So with that question in mind I thought I'd go and find out, I should point out right from the start that I do not have my own lab with a mass of bubbling test tubes and conical flasks and so have augmented my own knowledge with that of the research of a handful of chemistry professors (the most notable being Dr David Ball from Cleveland University).

So, a little background.
Honey has been used as a food source for thousands of years now although it is only produced by between 6 to 11 of the total bee species (of which there are in theory about 20,000).

When we first look at honey we really see a jar of sugar based food, what we're actually looking at is a jar of a super saturated sugar solution, that is to say that we know that honey contains some water (typically 18% or less) and so the rest is 'sugars'. So, because the water has about 80% sugar desolved in it that's why we call it a super saturated solution (whilst researching this article I found that anything with more than 63% sugar to water content was referred to as being a super saturated solution).

I can already guess that there are some confused faces at this point (just a guess) - SUGAR! what do you mean sugar, I thought it was honey?

When the bees go out and harvest nectar from flowers they are effectively harvesting a natural group of carbohyfrates that we loosely group together with the name 'sugars', these are illustrated below (you wont have to remember them, there wont be a test later):

As I said, you don't need to remember these, they're just FYI.

The three most commonly found sugars in honey are glucose, fructose and sucrose (although the other two will typically be in there, just in comparatively smaller quantities)
One of the things that is perhaps worth noting is that the combination of these sugars which is found in a sample of honey will be determined to a large extent by the flora that the bees have been visiting - so for example the break down from orange trees will be different to the breakdown from sunflowers.
Perhaps another interesting point is that a honeys fructose content will influence how quickly it will crystalise - the less fructose the longer it takes (so pine tree honey will either not crystalise or will take for ever to do so because there is little or no fructose in pine).

But to answer the question 'what is actually in honey' lets consider the table below:

As you can see the content of honey is actually quite simple, I guess the surprising thing for most would be the acid content.
For reference the acid and enzymes within the honey come primarily from the the bee, specifically from the bees Salivary and Hypopharyngeal glands - it is these glands that are primarily responsible for transforming the pollen/nectar into honey.

The above list however does not specify the mineral or vitamin content:

ppm = parts per million

Once the bees have performed this transformation it remains to lower the water content, to this end the bees put the honey into the honey comb cells, once a cell is full they cap it (using wax) and then leave it to mature, they also fan the cells with their wings in order to aid the maturing process (maintaining a constant temperature).

So, now you know - and I think I managed to explain it without going to heavily into the chemistry of it (I'll probably detail more technically a lot of the things that I left out of this article when I discuss the biology of a bee - something to look forward to).