Your favorite brand of honey may not be honey at all. Testing shows a majority of honey sold in U.S. grocery stores is produced using a filtering system to remove the pollen which means the honey is not exactly what the bees produce. The removal of pollen from honey makes it impossible to determine whether the product came from legitimate and safe sources. The Food and Drug Administration says any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen is not honey. But the agency does not check honey sold in the U.S. to see if it contains pollen.

Recent testing for Food and Safety News looked at 60 brands of honey from ten states and the District of Columbia. The honey was analyzed by an industry expert at Texas A&M University. 76 percent of the samples bought at grocery stores had all of the pollen removed. 100 percent of the honey sampled from drugstores like Walgreens and CVS had no pollen. The testing did find that all of the samples purchased at farmers markets, co-ops and natural food stores like Trader Joe’s contained the full amount of honey. The Food Safety News analysis also found that 71 percent of the grocery store honey labeled as ‘organic’ was heavy with pollen.

Ultra-filtering of honey is a procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced through extremely small filters to remove pollen. It’s similar to a technique used in China, the source of some of the honey found in the U.S. market. An earlier investigation by Food Safety News found honey from India on U.S. grocery store shelves that had been banned in Europe because of contamination with antibiotics, heavy metal and a lack of pollen.