" I am surprised that the US is still using clearer boards
 (fume boards), and
 something on them that apparently smells like vomit.  I
 can only remember
 using carbolic or benzaldehyde here."

Why would anyone use phenol versus butyric acid or butyric anhydride to make butyric acid?  Phenol smells far worse, is considerably more toxic, is a far more dangerous skin and eye corrosive, will even attack stainless steel and to top it all is a known mutagen which will even cross the placenta?  I have used both in the lab and would far rather use either butyric acid or butyric anhydride than phenol.  Phenol is quite disagreeable smelling and very dangerous stuff.  If you get it on your clothes the smell will linger at least as badly as butryic acid except it smells worse.  Yes, I know it is the active ingredient in some household products.  I will not allow those products in my house as they are too obnoxious smelling and too dangerous to health to run the risk.

The fact is butyric acid really does not smell all that bad.  Go get a load of fresh mulch from a big pile at the local the garden center and spread it around your plants.  Chances are very high you will notice an odor produced by anerobic decomposition that took place in the pile.  That odor is butyric acid.  Go smell many well aged cheeses.  Part of what you smell is butyric acid.  Frankly, using phenol on an fume board to harvest honey strikes me as really out of line in terms of possible honey contamination versus using many other products including using butyric acid.  After all, honey often naturally contains tiny amounts of butyric acid while it will never naturally contain phenol.

If you want to use benzaldehyde I have no objection.  I like the smell of benzaldehyde.  It is quite safe stuff to handle and if ingested rapidly metabolized to benzoic acid which is rapidly excreted by your kidneys as hippuric acid.  Hippuric acid is what horses produce in their urine naturally to get rid of nitrogen waste.  Humans generally do not have the benzoic acid in their systems needed to make hippuric acid so humans excrete urea to get rid of waste nitrogen.  It was not all that long ago that a regular undergrad lab experiment was to eat some benzoic acid and isolate the hippuric acid the student produced and excreted in his urine.

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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