It completely depends on your school, so I don't think anybody can answer your question.
In the high school I went to, we had honors and regular English classes up through junior year, until you could take AP in your senior year. For the first three years, the honors curriculum was similar to that of the regular classes, it was just a brighter group of students, facilitating different levels of work and discussion. They were usually taught by some of the teachers with more seniority. Expectations were pretty much the same, but in some schools, there are huge differences. Until about a two years ago, your only options senior year were AP or the regular English curriculum, which was a complete cop-out of two half-year electives. People didn't want to take those because they were too easy, and didn't want to take AP because it was a huge demand, so a senior honors course was added to try to make everybody happy. Its syllabus was modeled after the AP curriculum, which had its original basis in a freshman English class in the NY State University system, but was a bit less strenuous.
The problem with your question, is that unlike the AP courses which are somewhat universal, honors courses can be shaped by the school, department and instructor. Sometimes there's a lot of difference between honors and regular, and sometimes there's hardly any at all.
A work of art is an invitation to love.
