How long can honey be kept?

Bees are an animal on Earth and are very common. I believe everyone has heard of them and can also see them in real life. Bees produce a substance called honey. Honey tastes sweet and is rich in nutritional value. Many women like to eat it. Buy a jar of honey and keep it at home to eat slowly. Of course, eating too much honey is not good for your health, so you can’t eat it all at once. You can preserve it. So how long can you preserve honey?

1. Logically speaking, honey has no shelf life. There are five foods in nature that never deteriorate. They are honey, white wine, vinegar, solid sugar and salt. "In 1913, American archaeologists excavated 3,300-year-old honey from the Egyptian pyramids. It had not deteriorated at all and was still edible today." "It can be seen that truly mature natural honey is completely edible after being stored for a long time and has no strict shelf life. However, when it is put on the market as a food, the Food Law requires that the shelf life be marked on the food product. Therefore, honey manufacturers generally set the shelf life of honey at 2 years." (According to "500 Questions on Bee Products and Health Care" by Guo Fangbin)

Second, the unexpected situation is, why do some beekeepers sell honey and say that the shelf life of honey is only one year? This is very simple. What it produces is immature honey, while the honey that never deteriorates refers to mature honey with a high Baume degree.

3. Honey itself contains many natural sugar-tolerant yeasts. When the concentration of honey is low (generally below 40 degrees Baume) and the water content exceeds 23%, under suitable temperature conditions (especially in summer), yeast will cause the honey to ferment. They convert glucose and fructose in honey into ethanol (alcohol), glycerol, water, etc., and release carbon dioxide to produce bubbles.

4. Many people say: "I bought honey from a bee farm, it's the purest!" But honey has no shelf life, so they don't understand why this "purest" honey would turn sour, go rancid, produce foamy gas and cause the bottle to bulge, and finally seriously deteriorate? It's very simple, that honey is unripe honey.

5. A few days ago, I saw a colleague holding a bottle of Comvita Manuka honey, which is imported honey originating from New Zealand. When I first saw this honey, I was surprised that its shelf life was 5 years. The shelf life of domestic honey is generally marked as 2 years or 18 months. Judging from the label, this Comvita honey should be raw honey imported by their general agent in China and bottled and produced in China. Why, under the premise of complying with the same Food Law, the shelf life of domestic honey is marked as 2 years, while that of Comvita is marked as 5 years?

6. There is no definite evidence, so my guess is: Comvita honey is natural mature honey, and natural mature honey has no shelf life, so there is nothing wrong with labeling it as 5 years. However, more than 90% of domestic honey is concentrated honey. Because of the processing and concentration, the quality is seriously damaged. If the shelf life is more than two years, two years later, when the industrial and commercial department comes to test again, many indicators of this bottle of concentrated honey will not meet the national standard (GB18796-2005), especially the "hydroxymethylfurfural" item. There will be serious problems and it will be identified as problematic honey by the industrial and commercial department. That's not worth it.

7. Therefore, two years or 18 months is the commonly used shelf life labeling method for concentrated honey in China. After a long time, it became a convention and everyone marked it as two years or 18 months. But it should be consumed as soon as possible after opening.