alt Hacker News2,000-year-old honey that's still edible? Oh, I so want to taste. My grandfather was a beekeeper, and I learned about the different flavors of honey as he harvested from different locations throughout the season.
It's fun to purchase honey from beekeepers a hundred miles away and see how the flavor changes. I personally like late-season honeys, which tend to have richer flavors from late-summer and fall flowers.
A rare treat I've had was honey from Pitcairn Island. This is how you get in the queue for a jar. https://pitkernartisangallery.pn/products/pipco-pitcairn-isl... https://livebeekeeping.com/honey/pitcairn-island-honey/
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foobarian • yesterday at 5:19 PM
The most interesting honey I had was "forest honey," which bees don't make from flowers at all.
> 2,000-year-old honey that's still edible?
No, it's a lie. I researched it a bunch back in September 2024 (I was curious what the oldest possible edible food was*), and the Smithsonian knows it's BS (because I emailed them about this to get it corrected). I was able to correct Wikipedia, but I see Smithsonian hasn't gotten around to bothering, so this keeps making the social media echo chamber rounds...
To be clear: no edible honey has ever been discovered in Egyptian tombs. Every single anecdote is either unverifiable, or a garbled telephone-game description of some decayed residue which might have been honey thousands of years ago (and often on further chemical testing, proves to not have been).
See https://gwern.net/doc/history/1975-leek.pdf
* https://gwern.net/oldest-food 'Abyssal bacteria' and 'dinosaur collagen' were my final answers.