The Complete Handbook of Honey

Chapter 1: Understanding Honey

The Working Substance

Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution made by bees from nectar, but that description undersells how strange it is as a food ingredient. In one sense, honey is simply the product of bees collecting floral nectar and then concentrating it through evaporation and enzymatic action until it contains roughly 17-18% water. But that narrow band of moisture is exactly what makes honey both remarkably stable and deceptively fragile. At 18% water it will keep nearly indefinitely when sealed. At 19% it is at risk of fermentation. At 20% it is actively fermenting in most conditions. For a professional buyer or producer, this is not trivia; it is the single most common reason honey fails on a production line.

The bees themselves do the initial work of reducing nectar from 60-80% moisture down to 40-50%, then allow the hive's ventilation to dehydrate it further until it reaches the range suitable for capping. Beekeepers extract the honey from the comb and further process it, but the fundamental product that reaches a commercial buyer is a biological concentrate. Understanding what the bees actually leave in that concentrate - and how their actions influence its chemistry - is the basis for every subsequent decision about handling, pricing, and usage.

The Chemistry You Cannot Ignore

A typical honey's dry matter is roughly 38% fructose, 31% glucose, and 17% water, with the remainder made up of maltose, sucrose, higher sugars, organic acids, minerals, proteins, and a host of volatile