blog said:
Because of its low water content and high acidity, bacteria, fungi and other harmful organisms cannot live or reproduce in honey so if kept properly (raw) honey can last indefinitely without any form of preservative.
Why does this low water content and high acidity only apply to raw honey? Is this different to honey that has been filtered and bottled?
blog said:
Raw honey has no treatment or preservatives and even when filtered with a series of progressively finer sieves may contain traces of pollen, wax, or even bits of bees!
By implication of the wording, non-"raw" honey contains (added?) preservatives...?
Certainly no 'may' about containing traces of pollen with sieves, and not even after fine filtering through cloths. You'd have to go to ~ 20 micron filters, with most UK honey pollens being 25-50 microns in size, although one can be up to 150 microns.
If you're wanting to give a genuinely useful explanation, be careful not to pander to incorrect preconceptions about sieving, filtering, and pollen content - or about "raw" honey, which in trade description terms is the current scam of the honey world - poorly defined, no recognised standard, interpreted variously and widely to suit, and often abused.
Coarse
mesh filters are about 2mm, or 2000 microns; fine mesh about 1mm, or 1000 microns.
Cloth filters - coarse at 1000 microns, fine at 350 microns, or even extra fine at 200 microns will still let all UK pollens in honey through.
blog said:
Some commercial brands of set honey are created by mixing (in bee keeping terms seeding) raw runny honey with another set honey with very small crystals which encourages the crystallization process. This is usually referred to as creamed honey as the sugar crystals are smaller than natural set honey.
Firstly, the process you are referring to is seeding, not creaming; seeding changes the granulation texture by using a preferred 'seed' honey of the desired granulation texture, whereas creaming changes a solid set honey into a paste set honey (regardless of texture).
Secondly, seeding happens in virtually all extracted honey, since even across a single frame there will be honey from different sources with different granulation characteristics - see the annual debate about whether some OSR income will cause all spring honey to set rapidly.
Thirdly, seeding is not a "commercial" process, it is undertaken consciously by many beekeepers simply to give a consistent and pleasing texture to set honey, and unconsciously by any beekeeper who extracts, crushes, presses, drains, opens the tap on a flow frame, or scrapes down to the midrib in order to harvest the honey!
If educating the public, it's best not to refer to "sugar crystals" in honey; a significant number
do take it literally and assume that coarse set honey is honey with sugar stirred into it. Similarly, 'creamed honey' is disliked as a term because customers look at the pale creamy colour compared to the run variant, and again a minority take the term literally and assume (by colour) that it has cream added. 'Soft set' is less prone to confusion.
Hope that helps. Not meaning to be picky, but anyone risks propogating myths and misconceptions when describing honey in simplified terms
