How to check if honey is real? How to determine natural honey Determining the naturalness of honey.

Only the beekeepers themselves know how natural and environmentally friendly honey from their apiary is, but any consumer can make a certain analysis. Before buying a large quantity of this valuable product, it is advisable to purchase a small jar from the same batch and do some simple research.

At home, so as not to run into a fake?

What kind of honey is counterfeit?

The history of fake honey began a long time ago, the first mention of its falsification dates back to 1855. Since then, the techniques of fraudsters have improved so much that sometimes it is possible to reliably determine its quality only in laboratories.

What honey is adulterated:

• immature;
• heated (melted);
• honey with additives and impurities.

Most often, sugar honey and artificially inverted sugar are mixed into a natural product, less often starch and beet molasses.

How to determine the quality of honey at home

Let's check maturity first. Some beekeepers, unknowingly or out of selfish motives, seek to start pumping honey as early as possible in order to sell it for the greatest profit.

What's wrong with raw honey? It will hold more than 20% of moisture, it quickly loses its medicinal properties, is stored worse, and often begins to ferment. In the process of fermentation, such a product is formed and becomes unusable.

How to determine the quality of honey? Maturity is defined in many ways. The first one is the viscosity test.

At a temperature of 20 0 C, you need to take a spoon with honey, place it horizontally, and start rotating. Mature honey does not have time to drain, but is wound on a spoon. If you lower the end of the cutlery down, honey flows from it very slowly, and leaves a tubercle on the surface. Unripe honey begins to drain during rotation, and the surface is quickly leveled. At lower temperatures, the viscosity decreases, at high temperatures it increases.

When testing, it is necessary to take into account the variety, since different types of honey have different viscosities:

1. Very (acacia, orange, clover).
2. Liquid lime).
3. Gelatinous (heather).
4. Dense (sunflower, rapeseed, buckwheat).

The second way is to check the ratio of volume and weight. Weight (net) of one liter of mature honey must be at least 1.4 kg.

Third: bubbles. If the honey has a sour smell, an alcohol taste, or bubbles slowly form on the surface, the honey has fermented.

Fourth test: paper. A drop of honey is applied to a newspaper sheet. If the honey is mature, it will remain on the surface. If damp, it will spread, leaving a wet mark.

The fifth method is suitable when the honey has already been candied. If it breaks up into two layers of different density, it contains a large percentage of water.

Let's bring impurities to clean water!

To increase the volume and give the product a questionable quality like natural mature honey, various additives can be added to it. How to determine the quality of honey? At home, it is quite possible to determine its purity.

1. The presence of impurities is easily detected: a small amount of honey is diluted in distilled water. A quality product will completely dissolve. If there are foreign inclusions, they will either precipitate or settle to the bottom.

2. Chalk can be detected by adding acetic acid to an aqueous solution of honey. If the mixture starts to sizzle and foam, there is chalk in the honey.

3. To increase the viscosity, starch and flour can be added to honey. In this case, there is nothing easier than to determine the quality of honey with iodine. Honey must be dissolved in water, and then drop iodine there. If the solution turns blue, it means that starch has been added to the delicacy.

4. Gelatin is detected by adding a 5% solution of tannin to a mixture of honey and water. If present, white flakes will appear.

5. Molasses in honey will show ammonia. A few drops of alcohol added to an aqueous solution of counterfeit will turn it brown.

Definition of baked honey

Often sellers try to sell crystallized old honey under the guise of a new harvest.

How to determine the quality of honey at home if it has been candied and melted? Signs of a fake:

• Heated honey is transparent and homogeneous, while the natural product is slightly cloudy due to the presence of protein compounds.
• The product has a slight aroma, caramel flavor, and it noticeably
• When the temperature drops to +5 0 C, vitreous threads form in it. Natural honey behaves this way only in severe frost.

sugar honey

Such honey has a white color and a very weak aroma (it should be noted that some types of honey, say, sunflower, also almost do not smell).

The taste does not have the characteristic astringency and light perspiration. If you smear a drop on paper and set it on fire, the smell of burnt sugar will appear. In hot milk, such "honey" is curtailed.

Finally

When buying, trust your feelings. Honey should be sweet, slightly tart and fragrant. From him a little and he is very pleasant to the taste. The aroma should be natural, floral. Crystallization is a normal process for a 3-4 month old product and older. Frozen honey in winter should inspire more confidence than liquid and transparent.

On August 14, the First Spas, which was also called Medov, was celebrated in Rus' - by this day the honeycombs should be filled, and the beekeepers begin to get the contents. In temples, from that day it was allowed to eat it - they made honey gingerbread, pancakes with poppy seeds and honey, gingerbread and other pastries. Honey fairs in Russia begin in May, when beekeepers begin to extract the first honey. On beautiful counters lined with a variety of jars, you can find honey for any, the most demanding taste. True, sometimes buyers are faced with the fact that for a lot of money they bought not a “natural product”, but it, and they can only hope that this honey is not dangerous to health.

For an unscrupulous manufacturer, the most important thing is to increase the mass of the product or even mix some kind of substance that should resemble honey as much as possible. Most often, sugar syrup is added to honey. Thus, it is possible to increase the mass and make unripe honey sweet. In addition, starch, beet or starch syrup, invert sugar, sucrose can be added - as long as your imagination is enough. We have collected tips on how to distinguish real honey from a fake at home.

1) Test for ductility Natural honey is by no means watery. It must be tenacious. Warm the honey to about 20 degrees, stirring with a spoon. Then remove the spoon and begin to rotate it - if it is of a normal consistency, then it should wrap around the spoon, and not drain. Then watch how the honey will flow back into the container - it should slowly lie down in a slide, forming bubbles on the surface.

2) Checking with a newspaper Drop some honey on a piece of paper (a piece of newspaper or toilet paper) - the paper should remain dry. If the honey has spread and formed a wet trail, then it has water in it.

3) Check on bread Another test for the presence of water, which should not be, can be done with a piece of bread. It just needs to be dipped in honey for 10 minutes, then removed. In natural high-quality honey, the bread should harden, but in fake it will soften.

4) Checking with iodine In order to detect impurities in honey, you will need to conduct a simple experiment. Dilute a little honey with water and add a drop of iodine there. If the liquid has turned blue, then it contains starch or flour.

5) Checking with vinegar essence To do this, you also need to make a solution of honey with warm water. If, when adding vinegar essence, the solution hissed, but it contains chalk.

6) Checking with a lapis pencil For the next experiment, you will need a lapis pencil, which can be bought at a pharmacy for less than 150 rubles. Make a 5-10% solution of honey and dip the pencil into it. If a white precipitate forms, sugar has been added to the honey.

7) Checking with an indelible pencil To determine if there are foreign liquids in honey, take a chemical pencil and a piece of paper with you to the fair. Smear a small amount of honey on the paper and try to write something through the layer of honey with a pencil. If after a few seconds you see an inscription or blue-violet streaks, it means that water or syrup was added to the delicacy.

8) Wire test Take a stainless steel wire, heat it on fire (you can use a regular lighter) and immerse it in honey. If a sticky mass sticks to the wire, then this is a fake. If the honey is natural, the wire will remain clean. And in general, as in the sensational case with combustible cottage cheese in St. Petersburg (journalists checked the quality of the “natural” cottage cheese bought in the store and found that it can burn for more than 10 minutes), you can try honey and set it on fire - you never know what it was made of . Good honey simply will not burn. A fake can change color, such as turning brown, melting, starting to give off a caramel or chemical smell.

8) Sediment check Stir a spoonful of honey in a glass of warm tea and leave for an hour. If after that a sediment remains at the bottom of the glass or on the surface, the quality of your purchase leaves much to be desired.

9) Testing with ammonia Mix some honey with water in a ratio of one to two. Then add a few drops of ammonia there and shake the resulting solution. If it turns brown, it means that starch syrup has been mixed into the honey.

10) Smell test Natural honey is always very fragrant. If it does not smell, then most likely it is not natural.

Before you go to buy honey for the whole year, be puzzled by what varieties there are and what color they differ in - this can also play into your hands in your search for natural honey. For example, buckwheat honey should be brown, flower honey should be golden yellow, lime honey should be amber, and mustard honey should be creamy yellow. The unnaturally white color of honey is a reason to think, because some producers do not take out bees to collect nectar, but simply feed the unfortunate creatures with sugar. The resulting honey, of course, does not have any valuable properties.

HOW NOT TO SPIT HONEY

When shopping is done, remember that honey should not be stored in metal containers. The fact is that the acids contained in honey can oxidize and cause the valuable product to lose some of its beneficial properties and can even lead to poisoning.

If you like to drink tea with honey, do not add honey to boiling water. Already at 60 degrees, the structure of honey disintegrates, and it loses its properties. Over time, honey necessarily becomes thick and cloudy, so if honey bought in summer remains liquid and transparent until winter, it is not natural. If the honey thickens from below, but remains liquid from above, this means that the honey was collected immature, and such honey can be stored for only a few months.

HEALING PROPERTIES OF DIFFERENT HONEY

Linden honey used as an antipyretic, it has a diaphoretic property. In addition, it is bactericidal and promotes expectoration of sputum.

Buckwheat honey especially appreciated in the treatment and prevention of anemia, with hypo- and beriberi, useful for people prone to cardiovascular diseases. Such honey favorably affects the quality of blood and restores the body well after blood loss.

chestnut honey good for disorders of the digestive system and, like buckwheat, for problems with the cardiovascular system. In addition, it has an antimicrobial effect.

fireweed honey useful for the prevention and treatment of colds. It contains a lot of vitamin C.

flower honey women need to eat. It is useful for the female reproductive system, is used for the prevention and treatment of gynecological diseases. With erosion, ladies are recommended to use sainfoin honey. And during the breastfeeding period, breastfeeding is useful sweet clover honey which promotes milk production. This type of honey also has anti-inflammatory, soothing and analgesic effects.

chestnut honey useful for men with potency problems. In general, men are advised to buy dark and bitter varieties of honey, for example, buckwheat.

Honey with perga (pollen rammed by bees) has a pronounced immunostimulatory effect. It restores immunity well, including after illnesses and operations.

Meadow forbs honey helps with insomnia and headaches.

Maria Al-Salkhani

Greetings to everyone in my electronic beekeeper diary!

Yesterday a friend called me and asked me to consult about honey. He was going to visit relatives in Kazakhstan and wanted to bring local honey to his grandmother.

Walking through the shelves, I bought a couple of jars for testing from different manufacturers, as a result, one honey turned out to be sour, the other began to hurt my stomach.

I explained to him for a long time how to choose a good product, and then I thought that it would be better to write down all these recommendations so that I could take a printout with me. Look for helpful tips below.

A few tricks when choosing honey

• Liquid honey happens only within a month after the honey collection, which lasts from the end of July to the end of September. By the end of October, all collected honey begins to crystallize and thicken, except for honey from acacia and heather. Therefore, if you are offered liquid honey on the market in winter, most likely it has been melted or diluted with glucose syrup. Remember that when honey is heated to 40 degrees and above, it loses all its valuable properties and turns into ordinary sweet syrup.
• To check the naturalness of liquid honey, dip a spoon into it and lift it up - high-quality honey will slowly flow down a long thread, and if it breaks, then a slide will form on the surface of the honey, which will slowly spread. Fake honey quickly pours from a spoon or scatters with splashes. You can wind honey on a spoon - if it lays down in even folds, it means that this is not a fake in front of you.
• Be sure to smell the honey and taste it - it should have a fragrant smell and a characteristic taste that cannot be compared with anything else. The absence of aroma indicates the artificial origin of honey, and the caramel flavor indicates that the honey was exposed to high temperatures.
• The color of honey is not an indicator of its quality, so white honey does not mean sugary, and dark brown color does not indicate the presence of molasses or sugar syrup in honey. Sweet clover, acacia and fireweed honey have light shades, buckwheat, cherry and honeydew honey are dark brown, and other varieties can be light yellow, amber and dark amber.

There are ways to more detailed check the quality of honey at home. Some housewives dissolve honey in water and drip lugol or iodine - a blue solution indicates that starch or flour has been added to the product. More inquisitive experts arrange a real chemical laboratory in the kitchen, but this can be avoided if you take honey from a familiar trusted beekeeper who keeps bees in an ecologically clean area.

Source: www.edimdoma.ru

How to choose natural honey in the market

And the problem of how to choose real honey on the market is faced by many, especially city dwellers, is acute. It's no joke - both shops and markets are filled with fakes of the most varying severity, and in some places the sellers are so convincing and professional in their fakes that it is almost impossible to get away from them without buying.

So, instead of a truly natural product, some business beekeepers sell one that is made by bees, but not from nectar or honeydew, but from simple sugar syrup, with which the beekeepers themselves diligently feed their pets. Often sold honey is two or three years old, melted and poured many times. No one, of course, admits to its antiquity.

And the most severe fakes are vegetable syrups, with the help of additives disguised as a natural product. Such surrogates are most often prepared by evaporating melon or watermelon juices. Passing them off as natural honey is the most difficult thing, but sometimes scammers do it. In order not to be deceived and choose real high-quality honey, you should know the main features of a natural product.

How to distinguish good honey from fakes

1. Taste.

   It should be somewhat astringent and sugary. How to choose natural honey to taste? It has a pronounced specificity. Linden is somewhat more tender, sunflower or buckwheat - especially bright and clear. Fake or honey collected from sugar syrup tastes like banal sugar syrup. As a rule, they do not cause a slight burning sensation on the tongue, characteristic of a natural product.

2. By smell.

   Likewise with smell. How to choose high-quality honey on the market? Smell it! Any natural product has a specific aroma, even when thickened. And sugar syrups almost do not smell.

3. General consistency.

   It is easiest to identify by rubbing a drop of sweet treat between your fingers. How to choose natural honey? It will spread easily and be absorbed into the skin. Fake most often forms clots and lumps that are easily felt by the fingers.

   Very often, when choosing honey on the market or from hands, it is possible to evaluate its consistency by dipping a stick or spoon into it. The “correct” honey, when poured from a spoon, will form a thin thread, and on the surface of the main mass it will accumulate in the form of a pagoda, which will gradually spread. A fake, as a rule, drips from a spoon and immediately falls into the main volume.

4. By color.
   How to choose honey by color? This sign is the most difficult. So, some varieties of honey can be very easily confused with "sugar" because of their lightness. However, honey made from sugar usually gives the impression of being too white. In addition, natural honey is always quite homogeneous and transparent, while fakes usually have turbidity and a small sediment at the bottom.

But even knowing how to choose natural honey according to these characteristics, it is better not to rush and take the selected samples in the smallest quantities - a mayonnaise jar, for example. And already at home to conjure them. For example, there are good methods for assessing the presence of certain additives in the composition of honey.

What is added to honey

• Starch.
  It is calculated by the usual school experience: a few drops of iodine are dripped into a jar. In the presence of starch, the smudge on the surface of the honey will turn blue.
• Sugar.
  It is even easier to check: a piece of bread is dipped into honey and held for ten minutes. After that it is taken out. If the bread has hardened, then the honey is good. If it's soft, it means there's a lot of sugar syrup in it.
• Water.
  Water will definitely show itself if you drop honey on a piece of paper. A good product will remain a drop on paper, and diluted with water will begin to form liquid spots or even leak.
• Chalk.
  It is added to the composition of the product most often to give the impression of density and density. To detect it, it is necessary to drop vinegar essence into a spoon with honey. Hissing means bad.

In order to check whether the honey you have chosen is of high quality, you can simply poke it with a red-hot wire. If anything remains on it after taking it out, you have a fake in front of you. Good honey does not stick to hot metal. And only after these manipulations at home help you choose real high-quality honey, you can safely go to the market and buy from an honest seller a full supply for the winter.

By the way, it is important to remember that no natural honey can be stored for several years without thickening. Fortunately, after a few months it begins to crystallize. And if in the middle of winter they sell you a product that is clean, like a baby’s tear, and fluid like a mountain stream, know that something is wrong with it.

Source: sostavproduktov.ru

Distinctive properties and features of natural honey

Consistency is the first sign of real honey. First of all, it should be homogeneous, at the bottom of the jar of honey there should be no sediment, no delaminations. Also, depending on the time of year, ambient temperature, this indicator is different: young honey has a liquid consistency, and by winter it becomes thicker.

With the onset of cold weather, natural honey, as a rule, crystallizes (“candied”) - it becomes lighter, cloudy and thicker. If this does not happen, then the honey is falsified.

Attention!

An exception to the rule is acacia honey, this type of honey crystallizes more slowly than others.

That is why in winter real honey cannot be liquid, in this case it was either melted (usually beekeepers say “dissolved”) to give it a marketable appearance, or it was obtained as a result of feeding bees with sugar. By the way, in winter, packaged honey on store shelves is usually of a liquid consistency, which should be alarming.

• Pay attention to the fluidity of honey (this method is suitable for freshly pumped liquid honey). The quality of young honey can be determined as follows: dip a spoon into a bottle of honey, scoop it up and lift it up. Real honey lasts for a long, long time, flows down in an even stream, does not break into drops, lies on a plate in a slide, and then spreads smoothly over its surface. The last drop of dripping honey springs and pulls back to the spoon.

  If you turn the spoon around its axis, then the honey should “wrap” around it like a ribbon. Unripe honey will usually drip off immediately, no matter how fast you spin the spoon.

  Try also rubbing a little honey between your fingers. The real one is completely absorbed, while the fake one forms a lump that can be rolled.

• Taste. Real honey, in addition to being just sweet, should also be pleasantly bitter, cause a slight sore throat, it should have a tart taste. Hold some honey in your mouth and swallow - the right honey will "twitch" your throat.
• Smell and aroma. Real honey smells like flowers, the smell is unobtrusive, natural. Artificial has two extremes: the smell can be completely absent or it can be sharp, unnatural, give off caramel.
• The color of honey depends on the honey plants from which the nectar was collected. For example, flower honey comes in light shades, buckwheat - brown, linden - amber. The white color may indicate that the bees were fed sugar syrup. In this case, they ferment sugar and process it like ordinary nectar from the fields. The result is ordinary honey, which is difficult to determine even in the laboratory.

Of course, in terms of its useful properties and taste, it is significantly inferior to natural.

Often unscrupulous sellers already in spring or early summer offer buyers liquid dark-colored honey (supposedly buckwheat). This color can be obtained by melting last year's frozen honey. Such honey is “dead”, because when heated above 40 degrees, it loses all its useful properties.

For the same reason, honey should not be added to hot drinks (tea, milk, cocoa). For cosmetic purposes (during the preparation of homemade masks, scrubs), it is advisable to slightly heat crystallized honey in a water bath at a water temperature of about 40 degrees.

The so-called May honey is very popular among the population. For experienced beekeepers, the word "May" causes an involuntary smile. No, honey could theoretically be harvested in May, but no beekeeper in their right mind would forage sweet flower nectar and pollen from future brood, which they need for growth and development. Pumping out honey in early spring leads to lethargy, weakness of future working bees and a shortage of many tens of kg of honey in the fall during the main collection of bee products.

How to experimentally establish the authenticity of honey at home?

The high demand for honey and other bee products creates fertile ground for scammers. Currently, flour, chalk, sawdust, starch, sucrose, molasses and other fillers are used to create counterfeit.

Some types of fakes are difficult to detect even in the laboratory. For example, feeding bees that bring nectar from the fields with sugar syrup. The color of such honey is usually lighter, almost white, and it also crystallizes more slowly.

Methods for determining the fake honey using chemical reactions:

• Dissolve a little honey in a glass of water, then pour the liquid into a transparent container. If the product contains impurities (flour, chalk, starch, sawdust), they will either float to the surface or settle to the bottom.
• To detect starch or flour, add a drop of iodine to the honey solution, and the solution should turn blue.
• Drop vinegar into the solution. If something hissed - this is a sure sign of the presence of chalk in it.
• But using this method, you can detect the presence of sugar or starch syrup in honey. Prepare a 10% honey solution. Add a little medical alcohol to 1/2 of the solution, if it turns white, starch syrup was mixed into the honey. To detect signs of sugar molasses, you need to add silver nitrate or lapis to the remaining half. If a white precipitate falls out, it means that it is present there.
• The presence of impurities can also be determined using blotting paper (blotter paper). We apply a small amount of honey on paper, leave for 3-5 minutes. If during this time the paper does not get wet on the reverse side, then this indicates a high quality of honey.
• You can find out if honey is diluted with sugar syrup by immersing a piece of bread in honey for 10 minutes. We look: if the piece is hard, then the honey is normal, and if it has spread or softened a lot, then syrup was probably mixed into it.

Watch a video on how to choose the right honey:

Source: www.maski-natural.ru

Methods for determining the quality of honey

The people have their own methods of how to determine the quality of honey, for example, using a chemical pencil.

The bottom line is this: a layer of honey is applied to paper, a finger or a spoon and a chemical pencil is drawn over it, or a pencil is dipped into the honey itself.

It is assumed that if the honey is falsified, i.e. contains all sorts of impurities (sugar, sugar honey, as well as an increased amount of water), then a colored pencil mark will remain. However, the researcher V. G. Chudakov in 1972 tested 36 samples of honey of different quality, including 13 falsified ones, and believes that this folk method for determining the naturalness of honey and assessing its quality is absolutely wrong.

There is another folk method to determine the falsification of honey, it consists in a test on blotting paper. A small amount of honey is placed on blotting paper. If after a few minutes a watery spot appears on the back of the paper, this is considered a sign of falsification.

Again, V. G. Chudakov conducted laboratory studies of this sample, which led to the conclusion that the sample actually allows you to determine almost 100% of counterfeit honey, but besides, some natural honeys also fall into the category of counterfeit.

Advice!

If you buy honey, then look in the reference books for how it should look. The main thing is that it must have a certain aroma, honey taste, that is, a bouquet corresponding to a certain variety of natural honey must also match the color.

If the honey is too white, this should raise the suspicion that it is sugar? If the color is dark brown, is it not honeydew? If its aroma is blunted, the taste of caramel is felt - it means that it is melted honey.

Also pay attention to the consistency of honey - it should correspond to the density of the variety, at a temperature of 20 degrees Celsius it should be wound on a spoon, like a ribbon, with sweet threads that break at a certain moment.

Liquid honey should arouse suspicion. Most likely, this is unripe honey. It will not be stored, it will ferment, as it contains a lot of water. Such honey will not “wrap” on a spoon, but will simply drain from it. If you buy honey in the winter, it should not be liquid, and if it is, then it has most likely been warmed up or diluted.

When buying, check the honey for fermentation. When stirring, it should not be felt that it is not viscous, actively foaming, gas bubbles appear on the surface, that a specific sour smell comes from it, and there is also an alcohol or burnt taste.

Before buying a large amount of honey, buy 100-200 grams for a sample.

Beware of purchasing honey from apiaries located along highways with heavy traffic. In such honey, there may be an increased amount of lead compounds and other substances that fall on flowers with car exhaust. With nectar and pollen, lead gets into honey, and this is dangerous for the health of those who consume it.

Honey collected in areas with unfavorable ecology is very harmful.

How to identify impurities in honey?

To determine various impurities in honey, the following methods are recommended. Pour water into a transparent jar, add one teaspoon of honey, stir - the honey will dissolve, an impurity will settle at the bottom.

In order to detect an admixture of flour or starch in honey, you need to pour 3-5 ml of an aqueous solution of honey (1: 2) into a jar or glass and add 3-5 drops of Lugol's solution (or tincture of iodine). If honey contains flour or starch, the solution will turn blue.

An admixture of molasses (a mixture of cool water and starchy sugar) can be recognized by its appearance, stickiness, and lack of crystallization. You can also mix one part of honey with 2-3 parts of distilled water, add a quarter of the volume of 96% alcohol and shake.

If there is starch syrup in honey, then the solution will take on a milky color. After settling this solution, a transparent semi-liquid sticky mass (dextrin) will settle. If the impurity is absent, the solution will remain transparent.

You can detect impurities of sugar (beet) molasses and ordinary sugar by adding a solution of silver nitrate (lapis) to a 5-10% solution of honey in water. If a white precipitate of silver chloride falls out, then this indicates the presence of an impurity. If there is no sediment, then the honey is pure.

There is another way: to 5 ml of a 20% solution of honey in distilled water, add 22.5 ml of methyl (wood) alcohol, with the formation of an abundant yellowish-white precipitate, it will become clear that honey contains sugar syrup.

To detect an admixture of inverted sugar (grated honey), there is a rather complicated method: grind 5 g of honey with a small amount of ether (in which fructose breakdown products dissolve), then filter the ether solution into a bowl, evaporate to dryness and add 2-3 drops of freshly prepared 1 % solution of resorcinol in concentrated hydrochloric acid (sp. weight 1.125 g).

If the impurity turns orange (to cherry red), then there is invert sugar.

An increased percentage of sucrose in honey, which can be established in the laboratory, indicates its poor quality: in natural flower honey, sucrose is not more than 5%, not more than 10% in honeydew. The better the quality of natural honey, the less sucrose it contains. "Sugar" honey has its own organoleptic characteristics: the smell of old honeycombs, insipid inexpressive taste, liquid consistency (if it is fresh), during long-term storage it becomes thick, sticky, sticky.

"Sugar" honey (the bees were fed or fed with sugar), like all non-natural honey, is distinguished by the absence of vitamins, organic acids, protein and aromatic substances, and mineral salts. In sugar honey, silicon is the main element, and other salts are practically absent, there are only traces of them. In natural honey, the opposite is true.

If the honey does not crystallize, then it can be assumed that there is an admixture of potato molasses.

Advice!

In order to detect an admixture of honeydew honey, pour 1 part of an aqueous solution of honey (1: 1) into a glass and add 2 parts of lime water, then heat the mixture to a boil. If brown flakes are formed that precipitate, then this indicates the presence of an admixture of honeydew honey.

How can you spot a fake?

In a cup of weak warm tea, add a little of what you bought under the guise of honey. If you are not deceived, the tea will darken, but no sediment will form at the bottom. Over time, honey becomes cloudy and thickens (candied) - this is a sure sign of good quality. And not, as many mistakenly believe, that honey has deteriorated.

Sometimes honey during storage is divided into two layers: it thickens only from below, and remains liquid from above. This suggests that it is immature and therefore should be eaten as quickly as possible - unripe honey only lasts for a few months.

Attention!

Careless beekeepers do not take out bees to collect nectar, but simply feed them sugar. Sugar honey is not natural. There is nothing useful in it. Such "sugar" honey is unnaturally white.

In real honey, there is no free water - in mature honey, water (about 20% of it) is completely bound in a true saturated solution. Honey with sugar syrup has a high moisture content, this can be checked in the following way: dip a piece of bread into the honey, and remove it after 8-10 minutes. Bread will harden in high-quality honey. If, on the contrary, it softened or completely spread, then in front of you is nothing more than sugar syrup.

Tricks of honey sellers designed for gullible buyers

First, plug your ears and don't listen to what they tell you. Check everything yourself. Of course, one honest seller can fall for a bunch of liars, but how do you know that the one who is standing in front of you is honest? Try honey not only from above, but also from the bottom of the jar. Feel free to put your spoon in the jar and don't listen to the salespeople who start yelling, "Don't ruin the product!"

Unheated honey - both fresh transparent and candied - is an effective antiseptic, and a clean spoon in a jar cannot spoil it. Another thing is if there was not honey at the bottom, or this honey was previously heated, which led to the loss of its antiseptic and all other healing properties.

Crystallization (candied) is a natural process for honey, which does not affect its quality and composition of nutrients. Don't let crystallized honey fool you. Do not come the next day to the seller who promised you uncrystallized honey. They will bring the same, but warmed up. And in no case should you heat honey, because. this turns it into a simple sweet substance, devoid of so many useful properties!

Honey is a sweet food product processed by bees from vegetable juices. After painstaking work, they use it as a feed stock. The chemical composition of honey includes various sugars (glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose, etc.), trace elements, as well as vitamins and enzymes.

natural honey

There are a lot of varieties of honey in nature: buckwheat, linden, flower, burdock, raspberry, fireweed and more than 50 different types.

When buying this useful product, you need to be able to distinguish it from a fake, as more and more sellers are trying to cash in on this vitamin, diluting it with various impurities. Various methods are used to determine the naturalness of honey.

To distinguish real honey from fake, first of all, you need to check it for naturalness. Sometimes, to determine, it is enough to evaluate its external signs. It is better to do this during the daytime.

So, how can you define natural honey:

• The natural product should not be watery. After immersing the spoon in honey, the consistency should be viscous, but not exfoliate.
• The weight of a liter of honey will be more than 1.4 kg.
• Despite the variety and color, it must be transparent even with the content of natural impurities (pollen, bee bread, wax microparticles, propolis).
• Natural honey has a fragrant aroma and a slightly tart taste, bitter or sour, depending on the variety.
• 1-2 months after pumping out of the hives, it candied (except for acacia and heather).

candied honey

Counterfeit products are characterized by the following features:

• The aroma will be sour or completely absent. If you try the product, you can feel the taste of caramel.
• During storage, it is covered with white foam on top.
• A liter of fake honey weighs less than 1.4 kg.
• The consistency is not uniform, if you try to rub it with your fingers, lumps will remain on them.
• It does not crystallize, during storage it is divided into two layers - thick from below, liquid from above.
• Does not cause any reaction in a person with a pollen allergy.

Viscosity of honey

Let's talk about how to determine the quality of honey at home. This can be done using the viscosity of the consistency.

Heat the wire (stainless steel is the best option) and lower it into a container of honey. If the product is natural, it will stay on the metal instead of dripping back into the jar.

There is not much liquid in natural honey, and this primarily affects its consistency, which means it should be thick. You can determine the viscosity at an optimum temperature of +20 degrees Celsius, because at this temperature it increases. It is necessary to “wind honey on a spoon”, if this can be done without difficulty, then you have a quality product in front of you. After that, the honey will flow lazily, while the immature one will run fast like water. However, it should be remembered that the grade of honey can also affect the viscosity.

Viscosity of natural honey

Presence of impurities

Perhaps you have already heard about such a factor as the definition of falsification of honey. The presence of an admixture of starch, chalk, flour, saccharin, cane sugar, beet or starch molasses is quite easy to detect. To determine it, you need to take a small portion of honey and dissolve in a small amount of water. To the resulting impurity, you need to add a couple of drops of iodine. If after that the solution turned blue, then starch or flour was added to the honey.

Another good option to detect an impurity is to add a few drops of lapis (or silver nitrate) to the honey solution. The sediment will indicate the unnaturalness of the product.

To detect sugar syrup, saccharin, beet or starch syrup, it is necessary to carry out the most complicated tests, which will require research in special laboratory conditions. Also, the presence of impurities can be checked with acetic acid and ammonia.

Testing by heating and weighing

You can check by heating whether something extra has been added to the product or not. To do this, you need to take a metal spoon, scoop honey into it and hold it a little over the flame. If the honey product is ignited or charred, it will become obvious that this is an impurity. If it melts evenly, then this indicates its good quality.

Spoonful of honey to test

To determine the naturalness of honey by weighing, you need to pour it into a liter container and weigh it, do not forget to know the weight of the container in advance. The net weight of honey, not counting the weight of the container, will be approximately 1.4 kg or a little more. If your scale shows a lower number than it should be, then the honey is immature and its quality is quite low.

Checking with additional substances

Sellers of honey have different attitudes to the process of crystallization, in fact, this is a natural process, but an unscrupulous trader can add flour or starch to increase the weight of the product.

You can learn about the quality of a honey product in other ways. To do this, you will need liquids such as iodine, acetic acid and ammonia. As strange as it may sound, they are excellent developers of fake honey.

Iodine

Iodine is a good indicator to test honey for starch. Add 3 drops of iodine. If, reacting with it, a blue color of the product occurs, then we can safely say that it is a fake, and you will not receive healing properties from such a product.

Acetic acid

The admixture of chalk chips focuses on weight. To detect falsification, you need to add just a few drops of vinegar.

In the presence of limestone, the admixture will sizzle releasing CO2. During storage, some of the moisture in natural honey evaporates, and the liquid becomes supersaturated. And because of this, crystals appear, which is considered a natural process. You should be wary of the lack of a crystallization process in autumn and winter. From this it will be possible to conclude that you have been deceived, and your honey is diluted or has been heated.

ammonium chloride

Just add water to a small portion of honey. Take water with honey in a ratio of 2: 1, then shake until a mixture is obtained. When the solution turns brown and a precipitate of the same color forms, it will mean that starch syrup is present here.

Conclusion

There are a few more recommendations. An important factor is the impossibility of storing honey in metal vessels. This will lead to the loss of some useful properties and may also provoke poisoning. Honey also loses its characteristics at temperatures above 60 degrees.

The examples given will help you choose high-quality honey, because today this product is not cheap. Another main advice: buy honey from trusted people, acquaintances, so as not to become a victim of deception by an unscrupulous beekeeper.

Those who want to lose weight come to the rescue. Well, those who are not worried about the problems of excess weight can treat themselves to a piece of honey cake. It should be noted that only natural honey has the most valuable properties. Unfortunately, at present, some beekeepers are not chasing the quality of the product, but the volume. As a result of dishonesty, it has become quite easy to come across a fake and, under the guise of honey, acquire something that does not even smell like honey. Today you will learn how to determine the quality of honey at home.

The ideal option would be to determine the quality of honey at the time of purchase, then you can protect yourself not only from wasting money, but also from a purchase that will not bring you any benefit. It is known that some simply feed the bees with sugar to increase the volume of honey. In terms of taste, such honey practically does not differ from flower honey, however, in terms of useful properties, it clearly lags behind. There are several recommendations for choosing honey, we have already introduced you to them, but it will not be superfluous to repeat them. So, you can determine the quality of a beekeeping product by the following criteria:

Color

The color of honey depends on its variety and can vary from light yellow to brown. Flower varieties are usually light, linden honey has an amber color, while buckwheat honey gives off a brown color. At the same time, honey should be transparent, without sediment, if the product is cloudy, then this indicates that it contains additives. Often in honey there are bee products - bees, pieces of honeycombs, this should not alarm you, since this is a sure sign of the high quality of honey.

Aroma

Natural honey has a distinct smell that cannot be confused with any other. If honey is characterized by a slightly perceptible aroma, then most likely you have a product with added sugar.

Viscosity

You can also determine the quality of honey by its viscosity. Scoop honey with a spoon and lift it above the plane, natural honey will stretch with a continuous thread and form a slowly spreading hill on the surface of the honey.

Consistency

Anyone who has tasted natural honey at least once will confirm that the product had a delicate texture. Take a drop of honey and try to rub it between your fingers. If the product is absorbed, then this is a sure sign of its high quality; fake honey will roll into lumps during such manipulation.

Taste

And of course, the naturalness of the product can be established by tasting honey. Real honey has a tart-sweet taste. Taste a little honey, if you were treated to a natural product, then you will definitely have a tickle in your throat.

If you do not trust your senses, but are accustomed to relying only on research results, then you can also determine the quality of honey at home empirically.

How to check the naturalness of honey with water

Place a teaspoon of honey in warm water. If the bee nectar melted in a short time, and does not lie in a lump at the bottom of the glass, then you can be sure of the quality of the product.

Tea with honey is not only a delicious drink, but also an excellent method for determining the quality of honey.
If you dip a spoonful of honey into tea, the natural product will immediately turn dark.

Milk with honey will help with coughing and will identify a poor-quality product

It is known that you can get rid of a cough if you undergo a course of treatment with milk and honey. However, this will help not only cure the disease, but also determine the quality of honey. So, if you add unnatural honey to milk, it will curdle.

How to check the naturalness of honey with a blotter

Take a piece of a blotting paper or napkin and put some honey on it. After a couple of minutes, look at the back of the paper. If a watery speck was found, then the poor quality of honey will have to be stated.

Iodine and vinegar - indicators of the quality of honey

Fill a glass with warm water and dissolve a teaspoon of honey in it. After that, add a couple of drops of iodine to the liquid. If after a few minutes the water in the glass turns blue, this indicates that the honey contains starch.

Instead of iodine, vinegar can be added to water with honey. This will determine if the product contains chalk. As a rule, in the presence of foreign impurities, the water in the glass begins to hiss and boil.

How to check the quality of honey with bread

Can determine the quality of honey and a piece of stale bread. Dip the bread in a container with honey. If the bread becomes soft after a few minutes, then you have to admit that the honey is not natural.
The quality of honey can be judged by spreading it on a piece of bread. As a rule, a natural product lays down in an even layer, does not drip from the edges and quickly turns soft bread into hard bread.

Heating is an effective method for determining the quality of honey

Fill a tablespoon with honey and heat it over the fire. The natural product will char, honey containing impurities will ignite.

Chemical pencil will help to identify low-quality honey

Smear a drop of honey on a piece of not very thick paper and draw a chemical pencil over it. The appearance of blue stains indicates that the honey contains flour or starch.

Time will put everything in its place

If you don't want to experiment, you can just leave the medok alone for a few months. Time will do everything for you! So, if after a couple of months the honey began to thicken and crystallize, then this indicates that the product is natural. If honey remains liquid even after six months, it means that it contains a large amount of fructose. If the honey does not thicken, but separates into two layers - liquid and thick, then be sure that you have purchased an unripened product. Of course, it does not pose a health hazard, but it is characterized by a short shelf life.

We are sure that after all that has been said, it will not be difficult for you to determine the quality of honey, and if necessary, you can easily bring the seller-beekeeper to clean water.