Have you ever tasted flower nectar?

I grow gladiolus sometimes, and they produce a lot of nectar, but there aren’t any pollinators for those flowers around me, so I remove the nectar myself with a syringe. There isn’t a lot in each flower, but it’s nice in a cup of tea.

It doesn’t really taste like honey, even dilute honey. It doesn’t taste like just sugar water, either, though. I’m sure each flowering plant produces a subtly different flavor, like fruit.

And indeed, honey apparently tastes different depending what the bees are feeding on. But I’d say it’s probably a mix of something bee-specific and the nectar itself.

To expand on this... Part of what happens to the nectar inside the bee's honey crop is the addition of various enzymes (IIRC invertase is one. I don't recall any of the others) that modify the sugars and other compounds in the nectar.

So nectar goes in, the result of nectar + enzymes comes out, then it's dried until the moisture content is low enough (~18% is what I was told as a beekeeper. Who knows how the bees measure it...)

the flowers the nectar is collected from also influence the flavor of the honey, so you'll have slight regional distinctions there.