What Exactly is Fake Honey?
Fake or adulterated honey is honey that has been tampered with, either diluted with sugar syrups, chemically processed, or produced through unnatural methods like force-feeding bees sugar instead of allowing them to forage in nature, which exploits the natural biological rhythm of bees. It also lacks the natural properties and health benefits of real, pure honey.
What Should You Do?
The good news is, awareness about the importance of Australian honey is the first step in making the right honey choice. Together, we have the power to shift the market toward transparency and sustainability, ensuring a thriving future for bees, beekeepers, and our planet. Choose 100% Australian honey… Always. It’s in your hands.
The Facts About Fake Honey
In 2014, honey was the 10th most common food likely to be adulterated. In 2024, honey is one of the top 2 foods most likely to be adulterated!
Source: Food Fraud Database – FoodChainID
80% of the honey Australia imports are from Asia, including China (38%), Malaysia (19%), Thailand (16%), and Vietnam (7%). Their prices are below the cost of production for honey.
Source: ABS Quarterly Honey Import Data Report 2024
9 million killograms of honey was imported into Australia in 2024. That’s the equivalent of 22.5 million 400g bottles of honey.
Source: ABS Quarterly Honey Import Data Report 2013 – 2024
Beechworth Honey vs. Fake Honey
3 Ways Honey is Faked or Adulterated
Factory-Made Honey
This isn’t honey, it’s chemistry. By harvesting immature honey and nectar is industrially converted to honey in ‘honey factories’. The process of dehydrating and maturing honey partially happens here instead of inside the hive, producing a sweet-tasting product that lacks the nutrients, enzymes, and integrity of real honey. It’s quicker, cheaper, and more profitable, but it is not honey.
Force Feeding Bees
Some operations force-feed bees sugar syrups instead of letting them forage naturally. It’s like feeding a top athlete junk food. The result? Weakened bee health, poor nutrition in the honey, and a system that prioritises profit over pollination.
Syrup-Blended Honey
Another trick: mixing small amounts of real honey with cheap sugar syrups, then passing it off as ‘pure’ honey. These blends are often imported, poorly regulated, and nearly impossible to distinguish without lab testing.
How to choose the right honey?
Look
Look for the Australian Country of Origin logo that clearly states 100% Australian Honey.
Know
Know what to avoid. Look for vague labels like ‘packaged from local and imported ingredients’.
Fake Honey FAQs
Do you take all the honey from the hive leaving the bees with none?
We choose the best of the best beekeepers by having four generations of knowledge of good beekeeping practices. Great beekeepers know that the very best diet for keeping bees happy and healthy is honey produced by the hive.
For this reason our beekeepers work really hard to ensure they leave enough honey stores on the hive for the hive to eat. This is the primary job of the beekeeper to only take excess honey that the hive does not need. In periods of drought where there is a failure of the next honey crop it may be necessary for a beekeeper to prevent the hive from starving to death by supplementary feeding the hive with small amounts of sugar syrup. Beekeepers don’t like to do this, its inferior nutritionally, costly and time consuming and is only done as a last resort when mother nature lets us down! This syrup is fully consumed by the bees and does not make it into the next honey flow.