The abstract of this paper says:
"Our results suggest that bees receive nutritional components from honey that are not provided by alternative food sources widely used in apiculture."

I profoundly disagree with this statement as the implication is that honey is better for a bees health than HFCS or sucrose.  There is nothing in this paper to support such a conclusion.  Further the authors did not document what honey they used so the experiment may not even be repeatable.  I would expect significant differences in gene activity between different honeys simply because different honeys contain very different trace waste ingredients which bees must process in order to destroy or excrete as wastes.  I have no quarrel at all with the way the study was conducted.  Even if the HFCS or sucrose had been transformed into stored honey by the bees and assuming the gene expression results would be unchanged there would still be nothing whatsoever to support the conclusion stated above.  Absolutely nothing.

If natural honey is so healthy we should all be happy to winter our northern bees on honey dew honey.  After all, the crappier the honey the more gene activity a rational person would expect to find in bees right up to just before they die.

I also happen to know that at least one of the authors disagrees with me and believes this study shows honey is a superior food source to either HFCS or sucrose processed into honey as the latter lack unidentified health providing ingredients found in honey.

Dick
" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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