Does honey contain sugar or a natural sweetener?

Honey is a mixture of simple fruit sugars like fructose and glucose that is collected by the bees from flowers as nectar. The total sugars content of honey is about 70% to 80%. The bees repeatedly drink the nectar and remove some of the water in their bodies then regurgitate it (throw it up) back into the honey comb until it is concentrated enough to be honey.

A typical honey analysis would be:

• Fructose: 38.2%
• Glucose: 31.3%
• Sucrose: 1.3%
• Maltose: 7.1%
• Water: 17.2%
• Higher sugars: 1.5%
• Ash: 0.2%
• Other/undetermined: 3.2%