A cursory google about honey's antimicrobial properties suggest it's really not as trivial as the hygroscopic properties of sugar although I am comfortable agre

A cursory google about honey's antimicrobial properties suggest it's really not as trivial as the hygroscopic properties of sugar although I am comfortable agreeing that will be a contributing factor. So unless you're an expert in the field, I'd be curious to know where your certainty comes from. I never asserted it was a magical potion but after studying biochemistry, pharmacology and medicinal chemistry, I was pretty humbled by how little we humans think we know, and how primitive our methods are when compared against nature at problem solving. Our physiology is exquisitely sensitive, the fact that nature has found ways to exploit even things like kinetic isotope effects to good use undermines all kinds of naive assumptions we like to model over like "the chemistry elements express is the same across its isotopes". Modern medicine is still a woefully blunt tool in the face of the future of possibilities. So when the bees "engineered" honey to be a certain way, I like it as a product because it's been through an iterative design process and "clinical trials" for the course of millennia, if you will...