Hi Interested Beekeepers and Friends,
 
Ok, as promised my sample for private analysis of Honey-analog, H-ana, a
enzyme inverted cane sugar product, has been received from the Dhampur
Invertos Ltd. company who has an sales agent near the port of San Diego on
the Left Coast. The letter that came with the sample contains the same
objectionable material found on the Dhampur web site
http://www.sugarindia.com or at http://www.dsml.com .
 
(This does not in any way represent a Dhampur product that is for sale in
the US at this time or is it an endorsement of any future products that may
become for sale in the US or even one that I would buy or suggest to anyone
else they should buy. At the same kind I can not say it is not sold and
used here.)
 
Because my sample is for further testing I can not open it for that OLd
Drone 98 cent honey taste test as it would no longer be a valid sample. But
not to worry I can tell you what I see and even more interesting can
compare it to a sample of that 98 cent honey from Lane's in Oakland,
California as both are resting on top of my monitor as I write this.
 
The samples are approximately the same honey color grade, extra light amber.
 
H-ana is the darkest sample of any sugar product I have ever seen and  I
personally would reject it for feeding bees. I don't mix sugars with honey
but at even a small ratio of H-ana added to white honey it would no longer
be white in color let alone be honey and would take a real hit in farm
value. I can not report that all H-ana sugar syrup is this dark in color
but my sample is.
 
The H-ana sample is very clear not unlike highly filtered honey but it does
contain an unacceptable amount of what looks like crystallization that
would make it unfit for sale as a bee feed or mixed with liquid honey in
todays retail or industrial market.
 
Could this product be passed off as honey? I am sure it could, the same as
any other HF or HFC sugar syrup which in the early days of HFC in the US I
was able to do just that to a group of the largest honey packers and honey
importers in a private educational meeting. This sample is darker then the
one's I used at this meeting.
 
A few years later I did worse by passing around a sample of HFC in a nice
plastic container that contained a full vampire mite strip. The pest trip
was impossible to see because of the unique refraction of light of the like
plastic materials used for the strip and jar. (This is not the case today
as the plastic use in the strips has been changed and so has the amount of
chemical they can retain and release.) BTW, some packers and beekeepers
actually tried to open the container to taste test the honey but were not
allowed to complete that task.
 
Back to H-ana, tomorrow my sample will start its journey to a commercial
analytical laboratory for further study it will no longer be packaged as a
know product but will be looked at the same as an unknown sample of honey.
Because I will no longer have control of the sample I can not say when or
what information will be shared with me. But I will be very very surprised
if this sample comes back as a Unknown Honey as even I can by just looking
at it tell the difference which does not say if it was mixed with pure
honey the job would be any easier.
 
Chow, the OLd Drone
http://beenet.com