> Hi Jim
>
> Just thought I would pass on the information from the gurus
> in Australia who say that they cannot use the water isotope
> method you described on Bee-L for honey.  Apparently our
> Atomic Energy Commission is one who say it will not work.
>
> Can you point them in the right direction?
>
> Regards
> Trevor Weatherhead

I'm sorry to have wasted their time. I should have posted a public
retraction of my prior statements on Bee-L.  I will post this.

I was waiting for the labs hired by the (US) National Honey Board
to make a statement about what tests they thought would be best
before I mentioned it again.  Strange how it has been so long without
any consensus on how one can detect this fraudulent glop.

Yes, your guys are correct.  While the idea/theory/basic concept is
valid, and "should work", the problem is that the current hardware
simply is not good enough, and "the technology" does not (yet)
exist to do what I described.

While "water isotope testing" DOES work very well for orange juice, and
is a valuable forensic tool in a wide range of other areas, it does not
even work for apple juice.  Like apple juice, honey has a confusing mix
of sugars and too many hydrogens floating around.  You just can't
"see clearly" enough.

Hydrogen isotope testing (Deuterium testing) may or may not work, but even
if it does, it is simply not affordable. The hardware for water isotope
testing runs about $250K US the hardware for hydrogen isotope testing runs
over $1 million US. The lab fees would bankrupt any budget for testing.

Maybe the technology will improve, but for the moment, all I can do is
observe that ultra-filtered honey, if filtered through the same type of
filter that is used to make the super-clear mead, as created at Cornell:

a)  Has an amazing lack of pollen grains of any sort
    (but pollen grains can also be eliminated by coarser
    filters than "ultra")

b)  Has an amazing lack of proteins (which are not filtered
    out by coarser filters)

c)  May include detectable levels of items found in tap
    water (lots of chemicals get added to water when it
    is treated), but only if those chemicals have molecules
    smaller than the filter size.

So, offhand, I'd guess that "low protein honey" is going to
be the dead give-away, and the test will be a "percentage
of protein per fixed amount of honey".

But heck, I dunno if the chloramphenicol is larger or smaller than
a typical protein found in honey, so someone should check on this
before we assume that filtering out chloramphenicol will reduce or
eliminate proteins. (I never seen chloramphenicol, and don't want
to, but proteins are pretty small.)

Do Australians fear that this glop will be sold to importer/packers,
and then to the Australian consumer, or are you more worried about
yet another scandal in a teapot over importing, and then re-exporting
"false-flag honey"?

If, as I suspect, the only real concern is over the tainting of the
Australian export honey, the best solution I can suggest is boring old
bookkeeping and auditing.  Technology is neat, but I'd suggest that a
CPA would be more likely to find this sort of fraudulent activity than a PhD.

Never underestimate the value of a Certified Public Accountant!
(Yes, that was a pun)

                jim

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