This syrup goes through a process where blueberries are soaked in it before

> drying.  The goal is to get the "sugars" into the berries so they can be
> dried with sugar as the preservative.
>

Osmosis does not work like this.  Soaking in syrup takes water OUT of the
berries.  Water goes through a membrane (berry skin) from low concentration
to high concentration.  So the soaking speeds the drying of the berries and
increases their natural sweetness but does not add sugar into the berry (but
increases the natural sugar concentration).   So, the syrup is diluted with
berry juice.

>
> During the "soaking"
> process, the natural acids in the berries turn most/ all of the sucrose
> into fructose (simple/single sugar).


First of all, I think you can't change sucrose into fructose.  Sucrose is
two carbon rings joined together and "inversion" or breaking them apart
yields a fructose and a glucose (more or less).  These simple single carbon
rings are left and right polarizing and used to called dextrose and levulose
for that reason.  Acid inversion is not as good for the bees as enzymatic
inversion (which is what the bees themselves use when making honey from the
sucrose in nectar).

At some point the product becomes
> too dilute from the water in the berries, and they put it in a tank
> where vacuum boils water off at temps 120 up to 130 degrees F.
>
   It is reused 2 or 3 times like this, and then the fruit drying season is
over.

This is where the HMF would develop.

Your location is important.  How bees deal with a low level of HMF would
depend on amount of flight possible during the winter.  Also location would
help for recommending a testing facility.

It sounds like the plant is making a dried berry product.  Sugar syrup is
also used in blueberry food plants to float the green berries off the ripe
berries.   It is used to adjust the density of the water to do this best.
It is rumored that the Bragg's beekeeping operation once lost a lot of bees
from feeding this syrup (the plant was using an acid inverted sugar syrup I
think).   I have turned down cheap deals on off spec HFCS 55.  The company
(CASCO) did the HMF testing for me.

But hey, if the HMF is not too high, sounds like the syrup, along with the
berry juice it has extracted would be nice for wine making.  I made prunes
this fall from our plums and soaked them in honey solution before drying
after cracking the skins.  Then I dumped the bright red juice with honey
into my apple cider barrel.  It tasted great and I hope the cider turns out
as nice as the prunes did.

Stan  (in PEI)

>
>

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