Many older apple pie recipes use honey instead of sugar, because sugar was once an expensive luxury ingredient.
Before industrial refining and modern distribution made sugar inexpensive, households often sweetened fruit desserts with locally available honey. Apples already supplied natural sweetness and acidity, while honey added both sweetness and flavor. Recipes could also use dried fruit, such as figs or raisins, to enrich the filling.
Apple pie itself is much older than its American image. Medieval English recipes combined apples with spices and other fruit inside a pastry casing. Modern versions usually rely on granulated sugar, but honey remains a plausible historical sweetener and can make the filling taste more floral and deeply caramel-like.
Honey is not the same as corn syrup or maple syrup in this historical context. Those ingredients appear in some later or regional recipes, while the specific older-recipe substitution described here is honey for costly sugar.