As a food scientist, how can you differentiate between an original honey and an adulterated honey?
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Nice question. Let us make some research 
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Pure honey is more viscous than fake honey so it sticky to your fingers if you rub it between your thumb and index finger.
Dropping it in water will settle in the bottom but fake one will dissolve.
Etc…
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Hi Roy! Interesting insights. What do you suppose makes genuine honey more viscous and resist dissolution in water?
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Pure Honey has higher total solids ,higher than 80% plus it contains suspended solids like pollen ,dust, proteins etc if compared to fake honey which is just colored and artificially flavored invert syrup with total solids content lesser than 80%…Usually around 76%
So the presence of those impurities in true honey ensure that it’s more viscous than fake honey .
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I think this is a good video about adulterated honey:
Is your honey real honey or just “sugar syrup”?
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Science of food my differentiation is about true honey from fake honey( which is totally artificial)…Meanwhike adulterated honey behaves like real honey as they share nearly the same quality except if discriminated by chemical and instrumental analysis.
As a food product formulator for me it does not matter if the honey is adulterated or pure as they perform similarly in the end product. I can even use fake honey but support it with really good honey flavor and the customer can’t tell the difference if I am using real honey or a fake one…in the formulated products
So for me this topic does not affect my work…and of concern only to those Honey distributors and resellers…
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Oh sorry. I thought @Odero was asking for the difference between adulterated and genuine honey. 
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Actually you are spot on…The OP is concerned about real honey and the adulterated one which can be tricky if tested by qualitative methods I mentioned…
My concern with honey often is to differentiate the fake honey from the real one.As I use it many times in confectionery products.
The later can be authentic or adulterated…If you are a customers you can’t easily discriminate one from the other and as an application guy, you can use both with identical results…
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I agree with you. Especially in the field of product development. If the target flavor or the hygroscopicity is achieved, then I guess that can do.
Unless of course you will be claiming that the product has honey. But even then, still might be a hard time telling real, authentic honey, even for claiming purposes.
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Hi Guys,
check out the following webiste:
One can use NMR chemical analysis to compare with a databse library of honeys from around the globe. this way one can easily pick up fradulant honey.
Cheers
Ajay
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hi, one more technique is used to check the purity of honey by, pouring honey in a open vessel and add water just by shaking u can see the honey comb structure as which clearly indicates the DNA structure. Its very easy to find.
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Sorry I’m late to the party on this thread.
Now that the scientific methods have been shared, I will explain how my villagers test for adulteration in honey and you can deduce the science behind each.
First, dip the head of a matchstick in honey and strike the match. If the honey is genuine, the matchstick will light up but if it isn’t, the stick will not light up (you can explain this with the water activity principle - the old folks in the village know nothing about water activity, they just know that adulterated honey will wet the matchstick, so it won’t light up).
Secondly, drop honey in a glass of water. genuine honey will descend as a ball and settle to the bottom of the glass. Adulterated honey will barely reach the bottom of the glass before dispersing and will continue dispersing instead of settling at the bottom of the glass (adhesion and cohesion? Structure and bonding perhaps?)
The third test my village people use to test for genuine honey is the honeycomb structure test. You pour a small quantity of honey into a beaker containing water and slowly swirl it in an 8 motion on the table (the way you do with pour plate media in the lab). Genuine honey will produce the honeycomb pattern at the bottom of the beaker while adulterated honey will dissolve in the water.
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Nice explanation.
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Its easier on my side…
I usually get some amount onto a tea spoon and light my candle underneath…
Adultered honey boils first and if sugar is part of it…thw more you hear it , it will darken…(caramalisation) will occur…
Just like 5 mins…
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Well verified explanation
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As a beekeeper i should say that To be honest it’s near impossible to tell on a very well made fake honey and completely impossible in a well adulterated honey.
There are three types of fake hone in my experience: 1.fake honey that is invert syrup in it’s simplest form they heat up sugar with with some acid(usually citric acid) to reach some product that is similar to honey the quality of which is controllable by producer.
2. The second is the honey that is adulterated by adding and mixing pure honey with fake invert syrup to increase the amount of pure honey or alter the quality of fake honey to resemble pure honey.
3. The third and the most unnoticed method of adultration is feeding large amounts of sugar syrup to bees in harvest seasons, whereby they simply take the syrup and bring it to the right viscosity and then store it in honey supers.
Of all the mentioned methods above the easiest to determine is the first type, where you can simply test for amount of saccharose present in samples. Pure honey has less than 2 percent saccharose while a sample with more than 5 percent is probably is fake or adultrated honey(the numbers could differentiate in different countries).
As for the third method which is actually quite common among beekeepers these days(I’m a beekeeper myself and i can confirm more than 80 percent of honey produced is syrup fed), you actually cannot detect it by measuring saccharose, because when bees take the syrup in their honey sacks, they completely convert it to invert syrup with correct consistency so the only method of detection as far as i know is some sort of DNA test that checks for traces of sugar cane plant DNA (i read an article on this while ago so i don’t exactly remember the name of the method used but i know there is one), but even that method only works if sugar from crane sugar is used and it’s ineffective for beet sugar.
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You can take other vitamins from other foods,so you should look for unique properties such as aminoacids and enzymes.
Proline; It is one of the 20 amino acids that make up protein and is found only in honey. A quality honey has an average of 300 mg of proline.
Ä° prefer ones more than 800 mg proline value, which are real ones.
Other analyse methods may be necessary for crystallisation etc.
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Two important parameter which can separate natural honey and adulterated honey are
- Fructose Glucose ratio ( which should be higher than 0.95)
- Sucrose Content ( which should not be more than 5% in wild/Natural Honey and NMT 10% in commercial honey);
Other than this, HMF TSS also indicates the quality of honey.
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