And I was just reading the wikipedia page on honey. Honey is basically just a super dehydrated glucose-fructose solution. What ratio of glucose to fructose will depend on what the bees have been feeding on.
I don't see how adding honey to a tank is any different than dosing sugar. What makes honey special is the fact that it's a "supercooled liquid', meaning that it remains in some sort of liquid form well below it's melting point because of the innate properties of super-saturated glucose-fructose solutions.
It does have amino acids in it, but according to wikipedia, they account for 0.05-0.1% of it's composition, so not exactly a major contributor. I strongly suspect that to dose the equivalent amount of amino acid via honey that you'd get from a single frozen cube of mysis shrimp, you'd need to add so much that your tank would crash in an opaque cloud of bacterial anoxia.
It's got a tiny fraction of organic acids (like 1% or less). They're pretty common organic molecules, like citric, lactic, formic and butyric acid. Perhaps they do something in a reef tank, but you'd be adding very, very small amounts of them at a 'safe' dose of honey.
but yah, as soon as that drop of honey hits your water, it stops being "honey". Everything that makes it unique as a substance, from it's texture to it's viscosity, to it's 'super-cooled liquid' state, to it's anti-microbial properties, is related to it being a super dehydrated sugar solution. Add a drop of honey to a body of water a trillion times it's volume and it's just sugar and a teeny tiny amount of other relatively common organic molecules.
As far as a sugar additive goes, it's probably no more or less beneficial than any other sugar molecule. Table sugar is sucrose, which is a glucose and fructose molecule stuck together, so you're not really adding anything different than when you add just regular old sugar.
|