[burgerbrain]

"I gave a high school social studies class a simple food quiz. One of the questions asked, “Where does honey come from? A bear? A tree? Bees?” Almost all of the students got it wrong."

I'm not saying there was anything wrong with his testing methodology here or anything, but if I was given such an elementary question like that as a highschool student, I would have answered "bear" just for the shit of it.

[ars]

He got it wrong too, since honey doesn't come from any of his listed choices. Honey comes from flowers - it's gathered and processed (slightly) by bees. But it comes from flowers.

[roel_v]

No it doesn't, well at least not in the sense that 'car tires come from trees, because the rubber comes from trees and is slightly processed in the factory'. Bees gather nectar from flowers, and nectar is quite distinct from honey.

(my dad is a beekeeper, which doesn't make me an expert on honey and bees, but even the first paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey states the above).

[ars]

If I gave bees sugar water would they make honey? No. At it's core honey is made by flowers, i.e. flowers do most of the work. Bees do some of the work, but a lot less than the flower does.

I'm not saying there isn't a distinction between nectar and honey, of course there is. But there is also a distinction between raw honey, and the filtered, cooked, version you buy in a store. So should I say honey is made by beekeepers?

[roel_v]

That doesn't make sense. If I gave a tire factory saw dust, would they make tires? Of course not. The question here is: from what point on does processing some material constitute 'making' the end product? One could debate endlessly about this, because it's a boring definition question. Honey is widely considered to be made by bees, and I guess you could make the point that everybody else is wrong and that your definition of 'make' is the right one; fine, but I'm not going into that discussion. The broad consensus is that flowers produce nectar, which is then processed by bees into honey, and in common usage of the word 'make', that means that bees 'make' honey.

The difference between store-bought honey and the honey straight from the hive is minuscule, depending on the product in stores you compare it with. Here in Europe, it's against the law to call honey with added sugar 'honey'; that means that what you buy in a store in a jar labeled 'honey' is exactly what comes out of the hive. In many other places it's not regulated and there you can honey watered down with sugar (but that's usually all that's done to it, not processed further). When you compare '100% pure honey' from a store and the honey that comes out of the hive, the difference between the two is purely mechanical; it's just filtered to take out lumps and honeycomb, and that's it. The difference between nectar and honey is much greater - they are fundamentally chemically different. So it's much more of a difference as you make it out to be.

Also, honey is never 'cooked', because once it gets over (IIRC) 37 degrees Celsius, it looses much of its healthy properties because the enzymes break down after that.

[ars]

I guess you would hold that [wheat] flour comes from humans?

I don't, but we don't have to have the same opinions, as long as our respective opinions are self consistent.

So if you hold that humans make flour there is nothing more to say. But if you don't, you're going to have to explain the distinction to me.

[roel_v]

The problem is in your petulant interpretation of the word 'make'. As I mentioned, it's just a definition matter from here on. For some words the distinction between 'make' and 'process' is much less clear; I don't have an opinion on what the consensus is on whether flour is 'made' by humans or not, if the discussion had started out with this example, I wouldn't even have bothered replying.

Language is fluid and loosely-defined. It's not because the dominant interpretation is that honey comes from bees, that there needs to be a 1:1 relationship between other source materials and their end product so that the same word 'make' can be applied to those processes. Your demand for an explanation into the difference is therefore meaningless; there is an inherent vagueness in the word. Not everything is so defined that it can be explained in the way you apparently want is.

For example, I mentioned that honey is only mechanically processed from the hive into the pot. Does that mean that all processes where only filtering occurs do not constitute 'making'? No. Does it mean the inverse? No. In the flour example, one could make the case (I'm not doing so, I'm just explaining the mechanism) that the conversion from wheat into flour is purely mechanical and therefore does not constitute 'making'. But I don't find it a convincing argument. It just shows that each circumstance needs to be examined from several angles, and that (as I mentioned several times) there is no single definition.

(I had a paragraph here on the 'opinions' part of your argument but it was too vitriolic - objectively, I can't tell from your post if you meant it as I interpreted it; so I'm going to suffice with saying that this is not about 'opinions'. It's a about definitions, which are not opinions).

[burgerbrain]

"I guess you would hold that humans make [wheat] flour?"

Yes, that generally is held to be the job of millers...

[dalke]

Quoting Wikipedia: "Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers." "In the hive the bees use their "honey stomachs" to ingest and regurgitate the nectar a number of times until it is partially digested." "...the nectar is still high in both water content and natural yeasts, which, unchecked, would cause the sugars in the nectar to ferment." "...bees inside the hive fan their wings, creating a strong draft across the honeycomb, which enhances evaporation of much of the water from the nectar. This reduction in water content raises the sugar concentration and prevents fermentation."

Partial digestion, plus enhanced evaporation. That's not "slightly."

If you want, you can argue that there's a continuum. Orange juice comes directly from oranges, but most olive fruit cannot be eaten without processing to remove bitterness. Milk comes from cows (okay, and other mammals) and cheese comes from milk, but it's hard to say that cheese comes from a cow, since other factors are involved. Does beer come from barley? No. Beer comes from the beer maker, who uses various ingredients, including yeast.

So yes, honey comes from nectar, but the essential transformation which makes it be "honey" is done by bees. Therefore, honey comes from bees just like beer comes from the beer maker, and cheese from the cheese maker.

[ars]

I love that answer: "cheese from the cheese maker". Sure, if that's how you want to define "comes from" then honey from bees.

I prefer to define "comes" differently, and I most definitely want to argue "that there's a continuum".

As an aside "enhanced evaporation" just means blow air on it - that's enough to quality the bee as the honey maker?

Partial digestion means add some enzymes that break up the sugar. Again, it doesn't seem like much to me since I could do that too with saliva.

But I can't replicate what the flower does, and to me that makes the flower the most important.

[fractallyte]

You're confusing the raw material (nectar) with the finished product (honey). There's a lot that goes on during processing. But they're clearly not the same thing.

[burgerbrain]

Clearly honey does come from bears though. Plastic injection moulded bears, I have one in my cabinet right now.

It also comes from my cabinet of course, and from the store, and from beekeepers, and from.....