Are you buying honey or being stung? Knowing when you are buying the real thing.

Honey is loved by many, and it’s not hard to see why.

It's a versatile food - you can spread it on toast, put it in your tea, use to bake cakes and other sweet treats. It’s sweeter than sugar, might be useful for dieting and is even being called a superfood.

However, honey is also one of the most defrauded products on the market, with one third of all honey in international trade believed to be adulterated.

So what is honey?

The EU defines honey as the natural sweet substance produced by Apis mellifera (Honey bee) bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or from excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants which the bees collect (this is known as honeydew) transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in honeycombs to ripen and mature.

How is honey defrauded?

Honey fraud happens when the natural processes of honey are interfered with through intentional tampering.

Honey can be altered in several ways:

• When honey is diluted with artificial syrups such as rice syrup to bulk out the final product.

• When bees are fed during the nectar flow - meaning the bees store the feed rather than honey.

• The harvesting of immature honey which has higher water content increasing the weight and volume.

• Masking or deceptive labelling of geographic or botanical origins of the honey.

Why does it matter whether honey is defrauded?

You might be wondering: well if you cannot taste the difference and it is cheaper - why does it matter whether it is the real thing or not?

Good question - for a start would you buy organic vegetables that have been treated with pesticides or eat beef burgers made of horse meat? Probably not. Secondly, it might lack properties that you are looking for...