Natural bee honey has distinctive taste and healing properties. Natural honey contains almost all macro- and microelements, vitamins, enzymes, hormones and essential oils. All these substances are found in natural honey in a balanced ratio, due to which their properties are very beneficial for human health. However, medicinal bee honey is often falsified. Therefore, when choosing it, it is very important to be able to recognize whether it is an organic product or a fake.
Instructions
Step 1
There is a lot of fake honey both in stores and markets. There are relatively honest surrogates: flower honey, collected from the nectar of honey flowers, is mixed with low-grade honeydew honey (from the sweet secretions of insects on the leaves of plants). Such honey, unlike real honey, is excessively sticky. There is also a surrogate for honey from sugar-fed bees. Such falsification is not easy to distinguish even in the laboratory. But there are also frankly shameless fakes, which are obtained by mixing sugar syrup with citric acid and heating it. The artificial nature of this "honey" is masked: for the color - with a decoction of dandelion, and for the smell and taste - with honey essence and rose oil. For persuasiveness, "craftsmen" add pieces of honeycomb to the surrogate. At the same time, the product tastes quite edible, but there are no vitamins or enzymes in it. And, of course, such a surrogate does not have the unique healing properties of natural honey.
Step 2
The natural origin of honey is very important, especially if you use it for medicinal or cosmetic purposes. Linden honey is fragrant, transparent, pale yellow and even slightly greenish in color. Melilot honey can be completely colorless. It is especially useful for low-acid gastritis. Buckwheat honey is dark in color, tastes tart and slightly bitter, it contains more iron and proteins than white honey. Doctors recommend liquid acacia honey for overweight people and diabetics.
Step 3
When buying honey, you can ask the trader to show a certificate of quality: according to the rules, the seller must have a certificate for each type of honey. However, there are still few authorized laboratories for issuing certificates, and the analysis of honey is a rather troublesome business. Therefore, the administration of the market is often limited by the requirement for an apiary passport and a veterinary certificate.
Step 4
Natural flower honey has a pleasant scent, unlike a surrogate, which has no scent. The only exceptions are some flower honey (for example, from willow tea), which have a subtle smell or do not have it at all.
Step 5
The crystallized structure of honey is not a sign of its unnaturalness or staleness. Crystallized honey with a coarse-grained, fine-grained or fat-like structure is the normal state of natural honey. It is liquid only in the summer season. This honey can be easily turned into liquid if you keep it in a water bath at a temperature of 40-45 degrees.
Step 6
It is not difficult to identify impurities in honey. To do this, place a sample of honey (if possible, from the bottom of a dish) into a small glass container and add distilled water in a 1: 2 ratio. Signs of a surrogate honey will be: a cloudy solution with iridescent tints; precipitation of sediment with insoluble foreign matter (for example, sugar dust).
Step 7
Add a few drops of some acid or vinegar to the honey solution. If boiling or foaming occurs, i.e. there will be a release of carbon dioxide, which means that there is an admixture of chalk in the honey.
Step 8
Then put a few drops of 5% iodine tincture into the solution. The blue reaction of the solution indicates the presence of an admixture of flour or starch.
Step 9
Add a little 5-10% solution of lapis (silver nitrate) to the solution of honey and distilled water. There will be no sediment in pure natural honey. If precipitation is detected, then this indicates the presence of an admixture of sugar syrup (sugar molasses).
Step 10
You can also use another way to recognize natural honey. To 5 cm3 of a solution of honey in distilled water, you need to add 22.5 cm3 of methyl (wood) alcohol and 2.5 g of lead vinegar. The presence of molasses can be determined by the resulting abundant yellowish-white sediment.
Step 11
Since not all types of honey surrogate are amenable to organoleptic identification, a deeper examination of the naturalness and quality of flower honey is also carried out using special laboratory-chemical methods.
