I'm not suggesting honey flavors have no benefit, but it just seems odd that we have chosen those specific flavors as being tasty (honey and maple), when their primary attraction was that they came with sugar which was otherwise scarce (but no longer is).
Anyway, people buy fake honey simply because they think it is honey. So I don't think it is the specific taste that you can only get from actual honey.
Most people these days buy fake maple syrup (since real is so expensive), and tests have shown most can't tell the difference from real, and many prefer the fake.
Even without that usage, harvesting honey can be harmless to bees and benefit surrounding plant life. That makes it one of the best (if not the best) sources of concentrated sugar from an environmental perspective.
That's great if they can sell it and make money to subsidize the other part of their business (pollination). But if the economics aren't there, that's unrealistic.
Remember, honey bees harvest honey as food for themselves during winter. If you take away their honey, then you need to feed them sugar. The most practical thing is to leave the honey for the bees, and make sugar for humans from other sources that are cheaper (can, beats etc). If honey has some amazing benefit for humans that can't be replicated (whether flavor or health), fine, but the fact that so many can't tell the difference tells me that that isn't sustainable.
This is only in some parts of the world. My bees have never known winter.
I think you're missing my point but I don't have time to elaborate.
https://www.amazon.de/Dovgan-Birkensaft-mit-Minzgeschmack-Pa...
Probably not the "real" thing like the locals who produce it have, but as a city dweller i'm happy to be able to put it in my shopping cart. Once exotic and only to be had in russian speciality markets, it popped up in larger supermarkets with a full sortiment in the russian isles, and in the last few weeks even Lidl had it.
if you have access to a lot of raw birch sap you can have birch honey which is dark and robust, and quite dear unless you have acreage of birch trees and a ^lot^ of bees in spring.
This is similar with maple syrup, which comes from sugar maple trees. We sought it out for the sugar. Now that it is a really, really expensive way to get sugar, we still love it. Nevermind that other trees produce very similar flavors. Ever try birch tablets? They taste a lot like maple, probably just as complex a flavor, but of course they need regular sugar to sweeten them because birch trees make plenty of flavor, but not much in the way of sugar. Still, we seek out pure maple syrup because of tradition.
Now that we have far cheaper and purer sources of sugar, we still want honey, but again, more for traditional reasons than anything else. We try to convince ourselves of the benefits, because we really want to keep these traditional foods in our lives. And while we don't want it to be fake, we also can't actually tell the difference if it is.
This just lends itself to fraud.