There is a beehive carved into the Bank of England’s own iconography. It has been there a long time. The hive is a symbol of industry, thrift and collective trust. This summer the Bank’s museum is using that symbol to say something rather blunter: honey is one of the most counterfeited foods in the world, and the mechanics of faking it are not so different from the mechanics of faking money.

The Power of Honey: Food, Finance and the Golden Age of Fraud runs at the Bank of England Museum on Bartholomew Lane from late July to 28 August. It is free. It was created by Bompas & Parr with the British Museum of Food, sponsored by Visa and supported by the City of London Corporation. At its centre is the “Bee-nomics Inspection Hive” — a live observation colony, managed by Bermondsey Street Bees, rotated out every few days so the bees aren’t worn down by the job. Around it: sweet-smelling challenges, UV banknote investigations, historic food fraud, ancient artefacts.

The framing is what matters. Fraud now accounts for more than 40% of recorded crime in England and Wales. The museum has put fake honey and counterfeit currency in the same room, under the same question: how do you know that what you’re holding is what it says it is? Harry Parr’s line is the right one — fraud feels abstract until it happens to you, and honey makes it tangible.

For those of us who have spent years arguing that honey adulteration is a systemic failure of trust in a food supply chain, this is worth noting. Central banks do not mount exhibitions about problems they consider trivial. Honey fraud has arrived in the room where “trust” is the actual product.

And the point is how hard it is to tell.

The exhibition invites you to test your senses — smell the honey, spot the fake. It is a lovely piece of public engagement and it is also, precisely, the trap. Modern honey adulteration is not designed to be caught by your nose. It is designed to be caught by nothing at all. Sugar syrups engineered from rice or beet are not detected by the standard isotope-ratio tests. The people doing this are not amateurs mixing corn syrup in a shed; they are running a laboratory arms race against the analytical methods, and they are frequently a step ahead. If you can smell it, they have already failed at their job.

That is the gap the exhibition doesn’t close. Detection at the border remains thin, testing standards remain contested, and no amount of visitor-facing sensory play changes the fact that a jar on a supermarket shelf has almost certainly never been rigorously tested. Or even more is the “honey” used in your honey mustard sauce or salad dressing. The Bank of England Museum has correctly identified that honey is a fraud problem. Regulators have yet to act as though it is.

Go anyway. Take the kids. Look at the bees. Then ask why the analytical rigour applied to a £20 note has never been applied to the jar in your cupboard.

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