The Science Behind Honey's Eternal Shelf Life (2013)

ddownbad_ 2 days ago 31 commentsRead Article on smithsonianmag.com

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wolfi1•2 days ago

I don't know for the US, but in Europe fake honey is a big problem. There were several grocery chains who had to call back their honey because of it

teachrdan•1 day ago

Fun fact: The crime of passing off inferior sweeteners as (higher-priced) honey is referred to as "honey laundering".

https://kinghavenfarms.com/blogs/from-the-hive/the-sticky-bu...

teleforce•1 day ago

It'll be great if someone can invent an accurate in-situ low-cost fake honey detector.

For a low tech pure honey detection you can mix a few drops of honey with a warm water then swirl the mixture in a bowl. If you see the appearance of seamless hexagonal pattern appearing like a honeycomb, the honey is said to be pure.

I've used this method many times and mostly works, i.e the hexagonal honeycomb pattern does appear, but the honeycomb pattern probably can appear with fake honey as well. It will be very interesting to test this rudimentary technique with fake honey for accuracy.

mhb•1 day ago

Yes. Good episode about fake honey and its interaction with almond growing: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/beeconomics-101/

brk•2 days ago

That has been a global problem, lots of it in the US as well. I tend to only buy honey from known local producers, either at specialty stores or street markets.

rickydroll•1 day ago

2,000-year-old honey that's still edible? Oh, I so want to taste. My grandfather was a beekeeper, and I learned about the different flavors of honey as he harvested from different locations throughout the season.

It's fun to purchase honey from beekeepers a hundred miles away and see how the flavor changes. I personally like late-season honeys, which tend to have richer flavors from late-summer and fall flowers.

A rare treat I've had was honey from Pitcairn Island. This is how you get in the queue for a jar. https://pitkernartisangallery.pn/products/pipco-pitcairn-isl... https://livebeekeeping.com/honey/pitcairn-island-honey/

gwern•1 day ago

> 2,000-year-old honey that's still edible?

No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...

To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).

See https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf

* https://gwern.net/oldest-food 'Abyssal bacteria' and 'dinosaur collagen' were my final answers.

ai_critic•1 day ago

That's just because they're trying to keep all the best honey for themselves, obviously.

foobarian•1 day ago

The most interesting honey I had was "forest honey," which bees don't make from flowers at all.

layer8•1 day ago

Also known as honeydew honey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeydew_(secretion)#Honeydew_... It’s pretty common in Europe.

peterlada•1 day ago

Check out the M&M factory honey story, that was my most interesting one.

ynac•1 day ago

To some degree and depending on the brew style, mead is also a very very long ager. Plenty of stories of finding vessels in archaeological digs - still ready for a sip. I still have some bottles from my first batches of mead back in the 90s, and I have to say, they continue to evolve slightly - especially given how hot they were when I was a beginner.

downbad_•2 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11951860

neogodless•2 days ago

Above from 2016 (87 comments), and original from 2013:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263724 The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life (smithsonianmag.com) 86 comments

downbad_•1 day ago

Thank you!

tocs3•1 day ago

Maybe there is a new business model here. Aged honey. I wonder what it taste like (of course different honeys taste different already). I have some bees and will start labeling the honey and saving a jar or two every year.

cogman10•1 day ago

> I wonder what it taste like

Honey. :)

At home, we had a beekeeper that'd keep his bees on our land. He'd give us 5 gal drums of honey on request (no joke) which lasted years for us. The honey in those drums would crystalize and harden on top, but with just a bit of stirring it'd re-honeyify. It always just tasted like honey. I never noticed a difference as it aged.

mhb•1 day ago

> So if you’re interested in keeping honey for hundreds of years, do what the bees do and keep it sealed

Doesn't this make honey somewhat less unique? Aren't there many foods that will keep for hundreds of years if kept sealed?

cameron_b•1 day ago

Most foods taken from nature will still rot in their naturally-sealed forms. Pressure canned foods last a long time but use far more robust and energy intensive processes than a thin layer of wax and "the way that it is" to seal and stabilize the contents.

Ferments could be an outlier but usually dance on the edge of rot by design and can last longer than the raw cabbage or milk or meat they start from, but like honeycomb, they must be carefully stored.

adrian_b•1 day ago

The seal for honey has only the role to prevent it to absorb water from air.

As long as honey retains its original water content, it will not spoil.

In sufficiently dry air, you could keep honey without a seal.

For most sealed food, the integrity of the seal is much more important, because it must prevent bacteria and fungal spores to land on the food.

robthebrew•2 days ago

There is an interesting story (only slightly relevant) about glycerine. It was a pure liquid, held in many labs throughout the world. Until for some reason it crystallised in one lab. Wishing a short amount of time all the world's samples crystallised.

tcskeptic•2 days ago

Just to be clear -- this story is fictional, it did not happen in real life. It has become a bit of an urban legend because of a video game but does not have a basis in fact.

gwern•1 day ago

Source for it being fictional? The original 1960 source describes it as extremely nonfictional: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1960-analog-oc...

gjm11•1 day ago

It also, unsurprisingly, tells a slightly different and less startling story: it's not that glycerine crystallized in one lab and suddenly others around the world had the same problem, it's that glycerine hadn't been crystallizing in one lab but once the lab was sent a sample of crystallized glycerine the stuff always did crystallize there, presumably (assuming the story's true) because of some sort of tiny particles (whether of glycerine or of something else) that float about in the air or adhere to glassware and encourage glycerine to crystallize.

harperlee•2 days ago

Interesting! Could you expand?

wduquette•1 day ago

Obligatory reference to Ice-9 in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: a form of water ice that freezes at a high temperature.

mrob•2 days ago

Sounds similar to the real-life case of ritonavir:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritonavir#Polymorphism_and_tem...

gumgumpost•1 day ago

Isn't that somewhat similar to prions? I mean I know they're different things but one triggering the other to change shape? Don't know if prions also fall in some sort of lower energy well.

bradyd•2 days ago

Veritasium just did a video on this.

https://youtu.be/ksn5yrsC3Wg

danparsonson•1 day ago

Also less recently Asianometry: https://youtu.be/_xPhxtuA_Qc

ge96•2 days ago

Tangent vulture bees yuck