Honey: A Timeless Ingredient

On a rock face near the village of Bicorp, in eastern Spain, a painted figure clings to a rope and reaches into a hollow in the cliff. Bees swirl around the hand. Below, a second figure climbs with a container on their back. It is one of the oldest known images of people gathering honey, and it says something that every pastry chef and bartender already knows: people will go to great lengths for sweetness that comes from somewhere.

Honey is the rare ingredient that is at once ancient, everyday and still widely misunderstood. It is worth looking at what we actually know.

How old is our taste for honey?

Very old, though not always as old as the stories say. The Bicorp painting, in the Cuevas de la Araña, was found in 1920. As Gene Kritsky explains in a 2020 article for the American Bee Journal, it has been dated everything from the Mesolithic to the Magdalenian, 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. Kritsky argues it is better understood as Levantine rock art from the Neolithic, with a likely maximum date of about 3000 BCE. The painting itself has never been carbon dated. Its age is inferred from other sites.

That pattern repeats across the history of honey. The ingredient is undoubtedly ancient, but many of the numbers attached to it are softer than they look.

The most solid early find comes from Georgia. In 2003, during construction of an oil pipeline, archaeologists found ceramic vessels in a noblewoman's tomb about 170 kilometres west of Tbilisi. According to Eurasianet's 2012 report, the vessels held traces of honey about 5,500 years old, including linden, berry and meadow-flower varieties.

Does honey really never spoil?

Sealed and kept dry, it keeps for a very long time, and the chemistry explains why. A 2013 Smithsonian article sets out the reasons. Honey is mostly sugar and contains very little water, so few microbes can survive in it. It is acidic, with a pH between about 3 and 4.5. And bees add an enzyme, glucose oxidase, which breaks nectar down into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. Bees also do the drying themselves: nectar starts at 60 to 80 per cent water, and they fan it with their wings until it thickens.

There are limits. The same article notes that honey can spoil if water is added or the jar is left open in humid air. Crystallisation is not spoilage. It is common in less processed honey that still holds pollen, and a crystallised jar can be gently warmed.

You will often read that edible honey has been found in Egyptian tombs, sealed for thousands of years. The Smithsonian piece repeats the claim but names no tomb or excavation. It may be true. It is also the kind of fact that travels further than its evidence, and worth saying with care.

Why does the word for honey sound alike in so many languages?

Because many of them share a root. The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the English mead, the honey wine, to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning honey or sweet drink. Its relatives include the Sanskrit madhu (sweet, honey, a sweet drink), the Greek methy (wine), the Lithuanian medus and the Welsh medd.

So the Sanskrit madhu and the mead poured in a Welsh pub are, in language at least, cousins. Few ingredients carry that much shared history in a single syllable.

Honey is a record of a place, written by bees, one flower at a time.

What actually counts as honey?

International food standards define it narrowly. The Codex Alimentarius standard for honey, as revised in 2001, describes honey as the natural sweet substance bees make from nectar or plant secretions, then store and ripen in the comb. Honey sold as honey may not have any food ingredient or additive added to it. It must not be heated or processed so far that its essential composition changes. And for most honeys, moisture may not exceed 20 per cent.

Those rules matter in a kitchen. A product that has been blended with syrup, or heated hard to keep it runny on a shelf, may still be sold in a jar with a bee on it. It is not quite the same ingredient.

Why does honey purity matter so much in India?

Because the market is large and testing has been contested. The government's National Beekeeping and Honey Mission puts India's honey production at about 1.4 lakh tonnes in 2024, and exports at about 1.07 lakh tonnes in 2023 to 2024. The same document says India has become the world's second largest honey exporter, up from ninth in 2020.

Quality has been questioned. In December 2020, the Centre for Science and Environment published an investigation of 13 brands of processed and raw honey. As The Week reported, only five of 22 samples passed all tests, and only three of the 13 brands passed a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance test carried out in Germany. CSE said newer sugar syrups were designed to pass standard checks. Several major brands rejected the findings and said their honey met every standard set by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. That dispute was not resolved in the reporting, and the investigation is now several years old. Its lesson for buyers is still useful: a label alone does not tell you what is in the jar.

How should a kitchen or bar buy and use honey?

Treat it like a single-origin ingredient, not a commodity sweetener. Honey from one flower and one place tastes of that flower and that place, and the difference between a pale acacia and a dark forest honey is as wide as the difference between two coffees.

A few practices help:

1. Buy from beekeepers or cooperatives you can visit, and ask what the bees forage on and when the honey was harvested. The guide to buying direct from producers covers how to build those relationships.
2. Ask suppliers how they test for adulteration, and whether they can share results.
3. Store honey sealed, away from steam and humidity. Warm crystallised honey gently rather than discarding it.
4. Use heat with intent. The Codex standard limits heating because it changes honey, so add it late when you want its character to show.
5. Change honeys with the season, as you would fruit. A seasonal menu can carry the name of a local honey as easily as a local cheese.

One safety rule belongs on every menu brief. Honey can carry the bacteria that cause botulism, and NSW Health advises that babies younger than 12 months should not eat honey or processed foods containing it. A café that offers honey toast to families should make sure every server knows that.

The figure on the rock at Bicorp did not know any of this chemistry. They knew the honey was worth the climb. For anyone building a menu around local produce, that is still the right instinct: find where it comes from, and go and see.