On the Sting: How to Beware of Fake Honey?

Many properties have been attributed to natural bee honey, beyond its medicinal qualities. One of its miraculous properties is its ability to break down and dissolve any substance that enters it. Indeed, in laboratories that identify counterfeit honey, they fully exploit this property by heating honey diluted in water and adding a starch solution. After the starch mixes with the honey, they pour iodine into it. And behold - it remains unchanged and its color doesn't alter at all. This property was mentioned by one of the early Talmudic authorities, who used it as a basis to permit honey that had forbidden substances fall into it, solely because of this property that completely nullifies anything that enters it. However, from here to practical halakha the road is long, and honey has already taken a place of honor in the Jewish library, in the many discussions it raises.

If the honey is indeed real and natural, and not as we hear time and again, especially in these periods, about police raids and investigative units uncovering all kinds of warehouses that call themselves factories, where amazing findings are discovered - jars of honey of all types and kosher certifications, which are essentially water with sugar, containing flavor additives and thickeners, and it's doubtful whether the manufacturers themselves are aware of the mixture they're concocting...

Therefore, the first guarantee that we are indeed purchasing honey is that the manufacturer's number and address are explicitly listed. If one of these details is missing, chances are the honey is fake, even if it has a kosher symbol. However, even if we have confirmed that the manufacturer is known and recognized, we need to check carefully if there isn't a small asterisk next to the word honey, and underneath it in a hidden place it will say "flavored", which would then make it legally permissible to make the honey from whatever they want, just not from bee honey.

Natural honey - first, the color of honey does not indicate its authenticity at all. The honey may appear dark, simply because it was made from avocado tree blossoms, eucalyptus, and the like, or it may be light in color, this time because it was made from flower nectar, and it can even be marketed with a transparent appearance, because it was produced from bees that sucked nectar from thorny acacia trees. There may also be differences in taste, as honey produced from wildflower blossoms differs in taste from honey produced from citrus tree blossoms, or from tree sap or grain nectar. However, the thicker and more rigid the honey, the more likely it is to be natural. But sometimes honey is diluted with water, and sometimes even with flavor additives that give it a hint of lemongrass or ginger taste and the like. And remember, even if the jar says "100% natural" in huge letters - it still doesn't mean it's 100% honey, and it may very well contain natural flavor additives and thickeners, which require good kosher certification...

Besides that - due to the growing shortage in the honey market, the import market has grown significantly, and honey producers from our Holy Land who use imported honey from abroad, a fact that requires strict kosher supervision, since the honey extraction process requires a kind of cooking. True, if during the process the bee legs are cooked until they are completely removed from the honey, the honey is permitted for consumption initially. But when steam systems are connected to pots in which other things are cooked, or even if honey with forbidden ingredients was previously cooked in the vessel systems themselves, or royal jelly which many of us are strict not to eat, the matter is completely different.

But there is a very interesting discussion that occupied contemporary halakhic authorities: Can honey be marketed when the jar contains a piece of honeycomb, made of real wax in the form of hexagons? And is there any possibility to permit it for consumption?

To explain, we all know that bee honey is permitted for consumption, even though it is produced by an impure animal, and we have a rule that anything that comes from an impure source is considered impure and forbidden for consumption. This is because the Torah itself permitted honey for consumption. The reason is that a bee has two kinds of stomachs; in one it digests its food, and in the second it uses as a storage point for the nectar it sucks until depositing it in the hive, so the nectar doesn't undergo any substantial change until it becomes honey. Although initially the nectar was full of liquids, and when it turns into honey it becomes a viscous liquid, this is only because the bee managed to separate the water from the sugar without changing any of the nectar's components, and from a halakhic perspective, the honey did not undergo any extraction within the bee's body.

In contrast, the process of wax production is very different. Some argue that since wax is a fat compound formed by the complete breakdown of sugar in the bee's blood in a biochemical process, and is also secreted from another gland located in the lower part of the bee's abdomen, and not from the same gland where the bee deposits the honey, the wax should be forbidden, because even if we permitted honey because it did not undergo a change in the bee's belly, we cannot permit the wax that is created from the body of the bee, which is considered an impure insect. And perhaps, the wax that is placed inside the honey could also prohibit it, based on the rule that pickling (food that has been soaked in a liquid for more than 24 hours) is considered like cooking, and if so, the honey has been cooked with the wax. On the other hand, some argue that wax is actually a material found in the nectar of flowers themselves, and is even found in hair (even human), and the bee's role is only to separate the honey from the wax, and even though it expels them from two different openings, the process is still the same, and from a halakhic perspective their definition is similar, and therefore it will be permissible to eat the wax.

In practice, there are kosher certification bodies that have completely forbidden the wax, and therefore it is forbidden to polish apples with beeswax, and in fact, most of the mehadrin kosher certification bodies practice this way, but on the other hand, most of the poskim permitted wax for consumption, and there are many reasons. The most prominent among them is that wax on its own, without being mixed with natural honey, is not considered at all as something fit for consumption due to its bitter taste, and is very similar in its components to "royal jelly" which Maran zt"l permitted, moreover, wax is not considered as food but as a dry, tasteless substance, and additionally, to the bee, wax is considered complete waste. And let's not forget that there are opinions that permit eating honey for a completely different reason, since there is a special verse that permits honey and includes wax in it, and let's not forget that Maran the Shulchan Aruch, who permitted honey, also permitted the honey of wasps and hornets, which for us means that all the secretions produced by these flying insects are permitted, including wax.