Anecdotal but everything in that NPR article rings true to me. American consumers are used to the bear shaped bottles with purified honey that’s barely distinguishable from sugar syrup and could easily be adulterated but the raw honey I usually buy is so obviously honey from the taste and texture that I have a hard time believing any of it is adulterated. If honey producers were really that good at artificially replicating flavor profiles, they’d be far ahead of the rest of the food science industry.

I say that because basically all the honey I’ve ever bought in a store has always tasted flat and lacked flavor depth that has long made me wonder about its authority compared to known hive honey.

Go out and buy a good manuka or wild Himalayan honey and you’ll quickly learn how to spot the real stuff. The honey I buy isn’t meant to look like filtered golden sugar syrup so adulterating it is practically impossible. That said I buy it from ethnic grocery stores so unless you’re getting the good stuff at Trader Joes YMMV (I like their manuka)

Rare, but possibly the bees were doing a swindle.

Blue honey sounds cool though.

Supers (extra boxes) are placed on the hive when the colony is producing enough honey to harvest.

In theory the supplemental sugar shouldn't get into the supers.

I don’t know if that one is adulterated, or just processed so much that it is all flat and smooth.

Not sure if that makes it good honey, but there’s that.

Do not do this ifs the honey is in a squeezable bear container. The honey will boil, make a hole in the bear and spray honey all over the inside of your microwave (the turntable helps this). This will make a huge mess and will make opening the microwave more challenging.

You can double-boil if you want, where the jar sits in a shallow water bath which you boil for 10--20 minutes or so to decrystalise the honey.

I thought: “Costco wouldn’t lie to me? Would they?”

Now I must go and find out.

We have had wildflower honey crystallize in the honeycomb when we left it in the garage over winter.

It can be decrystallized easily with gentle heat. I put our jars in a water bath in a pot and leave it over a low setting for about an hour until it is good. The water never gets over 125 or so, which should be fine.

There are some genuine honeys which rarely crystalize.

Afaik (as an amateur beekeeper), it is not a good indicator of anything in particular, there are even reports of adulterated honey crystallizing. This make sense, since honey and fake honey are both a supersaturated solution of sugars that will gladly crystalize if given an opportunity.