Last week, food researchers from the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) found that most honey sold in the Indian market is adulterated. The CSE claimed they had chosen honey samples of 13 prominent Indian brands to undergo the NMR test at a German laboratory to check for purity. Only three passed the muster. Under the regulations of the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), adding anything to natural honey before sale—including sugar syrup—is illegal.

When naturalist and bee researcher Apoorva BV heard the news, he wasn't surprised. As chairman of Bengaluru's The Hive, a collective that's involved in bee-education and introducing sustainable practices to the agrarian communities, he has been trying to raise awareness on the issue for years. What's now being labelled as "Honeygate", where Chinese companies are allegedly exporting huge quantities of syrups to India at half the price, is something that Apoorva has been addressing in his lectures at agricultural universities, All India Radio programmes and TEDx events. "Earlier, big companies would use jaggery, then came molasses and now they are adding high fructose syrup, maple and rice syrup. They hydrolise the corn syrup, break it down into glucose and fructose and pour only 10 per cent honey. This way it's easy to increase the volume. The problem is that it's also possible to bypass the standards of Indian labs by using these ingredients." Apoorva, who is also the co-founder and director of HoneyDay Bee Farms Pvt. Ltd, says companies often smartly get away with this by their choice of words in advertisements. "For instance, they will say, it's NMR-tested, but not NMR tested and passed, or, claim that it's tested at source. At source, everything is pure."