Rick Green asks, "You said fructose and glucose is "dry".  Is this a scientific
term?  What do you mean by "dry"?""

I'm going to take a stab at answering this question according to my understand-
ing and logic.  If I understood correctly, when sucrose is inverted, there is
the release of a water molecule.  That would make glucose and fructose "drier"
than sucrose is.  On the other hand, when I buy sucrose in a bag at the store
it seems pretty dry to me, while honey, on the other hand, has about 18% water
in it?  You can set sucrose out in a dish and it will stay dry.  If you set
honey out in a dish, it will absorb water from the air.  That is honey's
quality of being "hygroscopic" or absorbing moisture.  In that way, even though
it has some water in it already, it is "drier" than sucrose, because it will
absorb more water than sucrose will.  Still thinking about wet and dry, if you
dehydrated honey, you would get a dry powder/crystalline mixture of glucose and
fructose that is just a "dry" as a bag of cane sugar.  I've seen dry honey for
sale in the store before.  People add it to their tea or coffee as a sweetener.
And if you add water to sucrose, you make a syrup out of it, just like adding
extra water to honey will make a "syrup" out of the honey.  Depending on which
way you are looking at it, one could be wet and the other dry.  I suspect that
the term "dry" when applied to honey versus sucrose is probably referring to
the original idea that when sucrose is split into glucose and fructose by
invertase that a by-product is the release of water molecules.  If I got it
wrong, somebody please correct me.  Thanks.

Layne Westover
College Station, Texas, U.S.A.