"What I am wondering  does anyone know if this applies to
Stainless steel  or regular carbon steel?"

The thing that makes stainless steel stainless is formation of a very dense and inert oxide surface layer.  Steel does not form such a layer to protect the under laying metal and as a result corrodes fast putting iron ions into the tank contents.  For most food applications stainless steel is as inert a surface as plastic as long as the contents are not anerobic with added strong reducing agents or agents that would attack that oxide surface such as chelating agents.  Honey is not generally anerobic, is not a very strong reducing agent and contains no strong chelating components.  I would not think exposure to stainless would speed up HMF formation due to the inert surface.  That inert surface is why food applications nearly exclusively use stainless steel for processing equipment.  If you are really worried about this a good cleaning followed by a rinse with concentrated nitric acid will pacify stainless by making a good, dense oxide coating.  In fact
 storage tanks for concentrated nitric acid are generally made of stainless steel.

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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