Why doesn't sugar and salt go off? ie: not get polluted by microorganisms?
Bigus
No protein present in either one.
COMMENT:
But honey doesn't decay or ferment either, and it certainly has enough protein to provide some nutrition for microbes (not to mention bee larvae).
The main reason for the self preservation of sugar is the osmotic one explained. If you dilute honey with water so the osmotic forces are low enough, it WILL ferment. Then you get mead. Indeed, if you make even dilute sugar water with that horrible supposedly nutrition-free "white refined table sugar," it will grow all kinds of interesting microbes as well. It is not, of course, quite pure. And the difference is everything.
