The Bees Are Disappearing And So Is The Honey
The honey in your kitchen probably… isn’t honey.
Fake honey has been a problem since the 1970s, when cheap high-fructose corn syrup gave producers something cheaper to put in the jar. The math is simple. Honey costs money to produce. Corn syrup doesn’t. Cheap industrial sugar syrups can be added to honey without making noticeable changes in color or taste. So some producers stopped filling the jar with honey and started filling it with something else, then labeling it honey and charging the same price.
It worked….. For decades, it worked.
The FDA defines economically motivated adulteration as the substitution, addition, or omission of a substance in a product to increase its apparent value or reduce production costs. Simply put, it’s an effort to cheat consumers.
Honey is one of the most commonly flagged products in the world for this kind of fraud. More than 70% of the honey consumed in the United States is imported. That’s 70% of the supply arriving from countries where the FDA has limited ability to inspect or verify what’s in the jar before it clears customs.
Analysis of 95 commercial honey brands found that 27% were of questionable authenticity, meaning they had potentially been adulterated with cane or corn syrups and shouldn’t be classified as genuine pure honey. One in four brands tested. Sitting on shelves next to the real thing with identical labels.
But the fraud gets harder to catch than that.
Some rice syrup producers openly advertise the fact that their products won’t cause adulterated honey to fail the C4 test... There are literally companies actively marketing their product as the one that slips past the government’s own detection method.
The FDA acknowledges that they can detect undeclared sweeteners with its current methods and is still developing additional methods to detect the rest. That’s not really a loophole, that’s a supply chain built around it.
The tests being used today can’t catch everything going into the jar. The fraud is ahead of the science designed to find it.
And this all happening while bees are disappearing.
The total number of managed honey bee colonies in the United States dropped from 5 million in the 1940s to about 2.6 million today. Between April 2023 and April 2024, 55.1% of managed honey bee colonies were lost, seemingly forever, according to the Apiary Instructors of America. More than half of the hives people take care of are suddenly empty or dying.
Colony Collapse Disorder was first reported in 2006. Beekeepers began reporting high colony losses where adult honeybees simply disappeared from the hives, almost all at the same time. Few or no dead bees were found near the colonies. The hives were full. The queen was there. The brood was there. The honey was there. The bees were just… gone.
One-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants. And the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination. Every almond. Every apple. Every blueberry. Every strawberry. Every cucumber. None of it grows without bees.
The real thing is harder to produce every year, from a shrinking population of colonies losing half their number annually, managed by beekeepers watching their hives empty out overnight for reasons science still hasn’t fully explained. The fake thing is corn syrup or rice syrup, processed to look and pour like honey, sold in identical packaging, sometimes passing every test the government has available to run on it.
And on the shelf they look exactly the same.
Which is pretty insane.
Sources
The Conversation. “Honeygate Deepens as New Tests Reveal 27% of Brands Are Adulterated.” https://theconversation.com/honeygate-deepens-as-new-tests-reveal-27-of-brands-are-adulterated-104139
FDA. “FY25 Sample Collection and Analysis of Honey for Economically Motivated Adulteration.” https://www.fda.gov/food/economically-motivated-adulteration-food-fraud/fy25-sample-collection-and-analysis-domestically-produced-and-imported-honey-economically-motivated
FDA. “FY25 Sampling Results on Economically Motivated Adulteration in Honey.” https://www.fda.gov/food/hfp-constituent-updates/fda-releases-fy25-sampling-results-economically-motivated-adulteration-honey
Nutrition Insight. “FDA Discovers Fraud in 10% of US Honey, Prompting Import Alert.” https://www.nutritioninsight.com/news/fda-discovers-fraud-in-10-of-us-honey-prompting-import-alert.html
Food Safety. “FDA Food Fraud Testing Finds Adulteration Among 10 Percent of Honey Imports.” https://www.food-safety.com/articles/8217-fda-food-fraud-testing-finds-adulteration-among-10-percent-of-honey-imports
FDA. “Economically Motivated Adulteration (Food Fraud).” https://www.fda.gov/food/compliance-enforcement-food/economically-motivated-adulteration-food-fraud
arXiv. “Honey Adulteration Detection using Hyperspectral Imaging and Machine Learning.” https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.23416
PMC. “Colony Collapse Disorder and Bee Age Impact Honey Bee Pathophysiology.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5513415/
USDA ARS. “Honey Bee Health.” https://www.ars.usda.gov/oc/br/ccd/index/
Planet Bee. “The New Wave of Bee Losses: Is Colony Collapse Returning?” https://www.planetbee.org/post/the-new-wave-of-bee-losses-is-colony-collapse-returning/
EPA. “Colony Collapse Disorder.” https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder
National Invasive Species Information Center. “Colony Collapse Disorder and Pollinator Health.” https://www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov/subject/colony-collapse-disorder
IFSQN Forum. “Latest 2025 FDA Honey Adulteration Testing.” https://www.ifsqn.com/forum/index.php/topic/50090-latest-2025-fda-honey-adulteration-testing/