Thread: Honey, raw it must be ! or nothing it will be worth

Originally Posted by ENT

Wasps have no wax glands so don't make wax honey comb as bees do.

Wasps bees same same.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Originally Posted by thaimeme

It's a wasp's nest ffs....

It's nothing but bees wax. I tried some.

If the comb was of wax, then it was beeswax, not wasp papier mache.

Bee larvae make good eating, too, excellent protein source.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

Originally Posted by ENT

Wasps have no wax glands so don't make wax honey comb as bees do.

Wasps bees same same.

Tell yourself that when attacked by a swarm of angry wasps!

Bees sting once with a barbed stinger which hooks into your skin, then immediately disembowel themselves in trying to escape and so die.

Wasps just keep going like a sewing machine along your skin, live to sting another day.

We have two bottles of honey(?) in the house. One is shop bought. The other was bought from a rural market and bottled in an old recycled Whiskey bottle. Now I'd have thought the market bottle would be fake but having tested them the shop bought one turned out to be fake.

Originally Posted by forreachingme

Idea of the post came as my daughter told me that raw honey is dangerous, contains whatever poison and must be pasteurized to be safely consumed...

And the 2 jars i just purchased in Europe

Damn misleading internet and unscrupulous labelling...

Once clean fields and hedgerows are now coated in pesticides, fungicides, weedkillers, chemical fertilizer nitrates and phosphates along with unburnt hydrocarbons, lead fluorides and other industrial emissions.

When buying honey, try to find its source, the countryside which the bees harvested.

Bees only normally fly about 2 miles or so away from their hives, depending on food abundance, so it's relatively easy to ask around to find what sprays and chemicals have been used in the locale.

After rains, when a lot of chemical spray residue's have been washed off flowers, nectar collected on a following hot sunny day is the cleanest you'll get in agricultural areas.

It really does pay healthwise to get to know your local apiarist.

Pasteurizing honey's not necessary, as pure honey won't harbour micro-organisms normally, it's antibacterial.

Adulterated with sugar and water as a lot of commercially available honey is, the honey can then become infected by micro-organisms.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

We have two bottles of honey(?) in the house. One is shop bought. The other was bought from a rural market and bottled in an old recycled Whiskey bottle. Now I'd have thought the market bottle would be fake but having tested them the shop bought one turned out to be fake.

I'm not surprised that the commercially packaged and labelled shop bought variety was crap, probably pasteurized with water added for boosting the producer's profit margin.

If it was the 'creamed' honey, a thick, pale, spreading honey, then it was sugared then whipped to make that nice creamy texture, also boosting the producer's profits as sugar weighs more than pure raw honey.

Not to be confused with the thick crystalised, older, stored honey.

I used this test.

Those tests work. Pure raw honey is only runny at very warm temperatures, otherwise it's a viscous, slow flowing product.

Originally Posted by wasabi

That is a honeycomb with no honey, only lava, don't tell me they eat that.

Yes we ate them ,Gert said darling look baby bee i want to eat.
So she cooked them up but i thought they tasted like damp cardboard would.
Turns out she cooked them up wrong so will give them another go soon.

Originally Posted by Pragmatic

I used this test.

Excellent clip, thanks for that!.

Armed with that knowledge, this local honey which is found in most supermarkets is real, should anyone be wondering about that before putting a bottle in their shopping trolley.

^ I'll remember that when I'm not in CM.

We get our honey from a local apiarist with hives stashed among an old longan plantation near rice fields, bananas, papaya, mango, tamarind and other fruit trees I don't know the names of.

Beautiful flavour and spray free, the lot, 1 gallon at a time.

Originally Posted by klong toey

Originally Posted by wasabi

That is a honeycomb with no honey, only lava, don't tell me they eat that.

Yes we ate them ,Gert said darling look baby bee i want to eat.
So she cooked them up but i thought they tasted like damp cardboard would.
Turns out she cooked them up wrong so will give them another go soon.

I have it on good authority that it was Wasps that you ate, next time get bees, it may not be the cooking method, it's the main ingredient that needs correcting.

Nobody's gonna try and sell wasp nests in lieu of honey comb, they don't even look the same.

Wasp brood combs are usually irregularly shaped, papery looking, rounded clumps, while bees will build honeycomb in flatish looking layers.

Bees cap their brood and honeycomb cells very neatly, convexed and right at the rim of the cell, while hornets and wasps cap their brood cells with irregular looking caps, often below the rim of the cell, which is ragged looking.

The situation with mapple Leaf syrup must be much worse than honey, i guess similar check tricks work as well somehow.

Maple leaf syrup's a sap, a resin isn't it? Probably even more viscous than nectar, but maybe not as viscous as honey.
I've never tested it, nor had any other than the occasional taste from a bottle.