Honey is considered the best alternative to refined sugar as it is the best source for zero calories; it adds sweetness to your mouth and improves your health status as it is rich in minerals and nutrients. You can find the best honey naturally from the bees but not the industries; sometimes, bees can feed on rhododendron flowers pollens with hallucinogens. This leads to producing a special type of honey called mad honey with a bitter taste and reddish in color. There are several ways one can identify natural honey, including:
The thumb test
The test requires you to place some amount of honey on your finger and watch out whether it will spill out like the other common fluids. If it runs quickly, then it is not pure honey, but if it is sticky, it is pure because natural pure honey is always sticky and will stick on the surface rather than drip away.
Water test
Here you need to take a small amount of honey and place it in a glass filled with water; impure honey will easily dissolve in water, while pure honey will tend to rest at the bottom of the glass because honey is denser than water. The test is simple and takes less than five minutes of your time; the clumping honey at the bottom should completely not dissolve if it is pure.
Flame test
Most people do not know that pure honey is inflammable; however, you should be highly cautious when performing this test. You will be required to dip a dry matchstick in honey, then try striking the matchstick against the matchbox; for natural honey, the matchstick will light, but for manufactured honey, there will be no light as it contains a great amount of water.
The vinegar test
Use of vinegar is another way to identify natural or raw honey from the factory manufactured ones; in one bowl, make a mixture of water, a tablespoon of honey, and three drops of vinegar and watch your mixture. Where your mixture foam up, then the honey is not natural, and it might have been altered or artificially manufactured in factories, natural honey remains pure and forms nothing.
Conclusion
Natural honey has many important health benefits to the human body, and therefore one should always be keen when searching for some. Some manufactured and altered honey can be toxic to humans, just like there are intoxications in mad honey that can cause adverse effects to humans. Do research and tests before deciding on purchasing the honey claimed to be pure.
