I could not find any references to artificial ripening of honey either, and it does not seem to make sense, since honey ripens by evaporating water into a more syrupy-consistency.

'Artificial' ripening of honey should then be thought of as either artificially heating the honey to make it evaporate water, or to add some sort of chemical to the honey to make the water either separate or make the honey more syrupy. Neither of these seems to make sense since the honey will ripen by itself with time, and it being a 'natural' product many people love because of it.

However, there is such a thing as artificial honey, maybe your term can represent the 'ripening of artificial honey', rather than the 'artificial ripening of honey' if that makes sense. Also note that I am not sure that I am correct about this.

See this link about the production of honey, see: http://weynshoning.be/en/bees-and-honey/from-nectar-to-honey/

And see this link about the creating of artificial honey, see: https://healthywithhoney.com/what-is-artificial-honey-or-fake-honey-what-we-have-in-our-food/

Dear Frisk, thank you for your valuable comments. Even I am not sure about "artificial ripening of natural honey" but the process of removal of water by heating makes some sense to be termed as artificial ripening.

Although I have never used or heard this expression before, I suspect it refers to the evaporation of water from honey which has too high a water content (by Canadian law , "honey" may only contain a limited concentration of water). Unripe honey is often found in uncapped comb. This can be dried by storing the honeycomb in a room with a dehumidifier for a period of time . There are also commercial honey driers which dry the honey by rotating a stack of disks through a pool of honey to increase its surface area to facilitate the rapid evaporation of water. Also, honey with a moisture content greater than about 18% can ferment and spoil unless it is pasteurized to eliminate the natural yeasts.

When we bring about the inversion of refined sugar in an almost complete manner and under well determined conditions, this sugar solidifies in the same way as natural honey after standing for a long time, and it ran be easily redissolved by heating. So maybe artificial ripening might be pointing out towards inversion.

Mamta Thakur

Different honey bees have different jobs. Some of these bees are “forager” bees, which collect nectar from flowering plants. The foragers drink the nectar, and store it in their crop, which is also called the "honey stomach". The crop is used solely for storage, and the bee does not digest the nectar at all. The forager bee then takes the nectar back to the hive, regurgitating the nectar directly into the crop of a “processor” bee at or near the entrance to the hive. While the forager heads back to the flowers for more nectar, the processor bee takes the nectar to the honeycomb, which tends to be near the top of the hive, and regurgitates it into a hexagonal wax cell. But now the nectar needs to ripen. The processor bees add an enzyme called invertase every time they regurgitate their nectar (and it takes many loads of nectar to fill a cell). The nectar consists largely of sucrose (table sugar) and water. The invertase breaks the sucrose down into two simpler sugars: glucose (blood sugar) and fructose (fruit sugar). By definition, honey contains less than 18.6 percent water, but water usually makes up approximately 70 percent of nectar. During the ripening process, the bees “dry out” the nectar. One of the ways they do this is by fanning their wings, which creates airflow around the honeycomb and helps water evaporate from the nectar. Once the nectar has ripened into honey, it contains so little water that no microbes can grow in it. It is called 'natural ripening of honey'.

But some times due to some unfavourable conditions natural ripening is not possible. So, nectar contains water. It leads to deterioration of honey during storage. This situation demands artificial ripening. So, we can define 'artificial ripening' as the removal of moisture by some artificial method which is not done by honey bee itself.

Thank you very much for your clarification Subhrajyoti Chatterjee.

I think this is cheating because when the bees drink the nectar, the bees release enzymes.

On the other hand, we helped the bee to produce more honey and this action helped the bees to live longer.