len gardener writes:
reckon the standard for honey must have slipped under the pure food
labelling rules or something? i have been told there is more than
honey in that brand honey and the other big companies as well. for me

There are always those rumours, though I've never seen any real evidence.
I once met some people who pounced on the fact that their honey was
crystallising as "proof" that it had been adulterated with suger!! "Look,
you can see the sugar there in the bottom of the jar!" Their mind was made
up and they just would not accept that 100% pure honey will do so under
similar storage conditions. I remember years back that alongside the jars
of honey, supermarkets would also sell jars of Honey + Glucose. When at
that time honey was so cheap, I always wondered why anyone would want to
dilute it with glucose? At todays prices, it might be time for a comeback.

I confess that I am a philistine when it comes to honey. I only have it
on cereal, and so long as it's sweet and sticky I don't notice any of the
subtleties about its flavour. (On toast it's different, but I rarely eat
it that way.)

pure honey is what comes out of a bee hive yes it can be mixed with
honey from hives that have sourced other flower vaieties hence
different colours and flavours. when we used to feed a honey mix to
the lorrikeets we would buy honey from a local bloke with hives, when
we used any of those store bought ones the dishes we fed the birds in
would go black with mould but no such thing with the real stuff.

I was telling a mate about the discovery that Manuka Honey will heal
tropical ulcers from the New Guinea jungle that some WW2 vets are still
carrying and bandaging every day. He remarked honey seems to be different
these days, and that a bottle he bought last week smells like ... urine!
I said, "That's what you get for buying the cheap storebrand, probably its
from overseas. What brand is it?" He said it was the local C brand. :-(
I guess it's just that there is such a shortage of local product that the
bottlers are using any and all types they can get their hands on and
blending them so that the stronger stuff that they may in the past have
not used is diluted by the milder.

when i need honey i try to source if right from the blokes with the
hives, sure as heck tastes a whole heap different.

But not so easy here in the big city. :-(

My Dad was an amateur beekeeper, and had about 60 hives dotted around the
countryside wherever he could find trees in blossom. He had his favourite,
yellow box honey. Some of the strong flavoured darker honeys he would not
bottle, just kept it for feeding back to the bees in Winter when their
larder was bare. ISTR that honey from Pattersons Curse was an attractive
pink colour at first, but changed to a dark brown as the honey aged. He
was very reluctant to hire his hives out to fruit growers (who wanted them
for pollination) because may times a neighbouring orchardist would then
spray his own flowering trees and the bees being no respector of boundary
fences would cop a lethal dose and also take it back to poison the hive.

Did you catch the news item last week about Cottees being fined because
their "Apple and Kiwi" cordial contained no apple and no kiwifruit?!! Now
what excuse could there be for that? Apple juice would have to be about
the cheapest juice around! I think the report was probably wrong, as the
contents list on a bottle in the supermarket last week said 39%
reconstituted apple juice. True, there probably is no kiwifruit as it's not
mentioned in the Contents List, so that may have been why Cottees were in
trouble. I see that Berri Lime cordial is 39% apple juice, and just 1% lime
juice (its probably there principally to stop the apple going brown).
--
John Savage (news address invalid; keep news replies in newsgroup)