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Marlena from Poland

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Наталія Грушко

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Zvenyhorodka,Ukraine

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Arzu Mammadova,  Azerbaijan

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Julia, Ukraine

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Julia, Ukraine

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To the kindergarten came a shepherd. He showed real hives, nests, honey, honey products. We watched bee and we tried this magical sweet potion.

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To the kindergarten came a shepherd. He showed real hives, nests, honey, honey products. We watched bee and we tried this magical sweet potion.

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swarm

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The most popular bee in Poland - Maja :)

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The most popular bee in Poland - Maja :)

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Marlena

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Pszczółka Maja - Taniec Mai (Official Music Video) - Piosenki dla dzieci

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Marlena Poland

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ქართული-თაფლი

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Find healthy, delicious honey recipes. Healthier recipes, from the food and nutrition experts at EatingWell.

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Honey has been used throughout history and is now farmed all over the world. Bees play a key part in the ecosystem. Use honey sparingly, enjoying its health-promoting antimicrobial and antioxidant properties, and thank the hard-working bees (and local farmers) who brought it to you.

A brief history of honey

It's the year 1702. You want to eat something sweet. What are your options? Can you hit up Whole Foods for xylitol or agave? Nope. You don't even have table sugar. But if you're lucky, and it's the right time of year, you might get a little bit of honey.

Honey has been humans' main sweetener for thousands of years. People didn't really have sugar until intercontinental trade in the 18 th century made cane sugar available.

Honeybees, which originated in Africa, have probably been around for 100 million years. So it's no surprise that nearly every world culture uses honey.

For instance:

Honey appears in Spanish cave paintings about 10-15,000 years old (see image below).

Honey is part of Buddhist rituals and traditional Indian and Chinese medicine.

Honey is mentioned often in the Jewish Talmud (honeybees are not kosher, but honey is), the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, and the Koran. In fact, the word honey appears 56 times in the King James version of the Bible; Biblical references to "the land of milk and honey," probably refer to Tel Rehov, one of the most important cities in Israel and a beekeeping center.

Bees and honey appear in Egyptian hieroglyphics (see image below).

Ancient Greeks revered honey. The Greek physician Hippocrates used honey to treat skin ailments, while the philosopher Aristotle thought honey was deposited from the atmosphere..

Honey was used for mead - the first known alcoholic drink in mythology.

Old Scandinavian texts, such as the Kalevala, the ancient Finnish epic poem, also refer to honey. The term honeymoon originated with the Norse practice of consuming large quantities of mead during the first month of a marriage. This practice was believed to ensure fertility during the lunar cycle.

In 1866 Franz von Hruschka invented the first device to extract honey from the honeycomb using centrifugal force (after watching milkmaids swinging buckets).

In modern times, honey is often used in Middle Eastern/Mediterranean, African, northern and southern European cuisine.

Americans now consume 156 pounds of added sweeteners per year. Roughly 1.3 pounds of that - or 0.8% - is honey. (Comparatively, China only consumes about 0.4 to 0.6 pounds per person per year.)

Things have changed.

35% of honey is consumed at home and in restaurants. 65% is purchased by the industry and used in processed foods/drinks: Honey is a preservative.

Honey types & variations

Comb honey is the purest, rawest form of honey. The beeswax is edible.

Raw honey often contains wax, pollen, and other bee parts.

Liquid honey is often pasteurized (which decreases the chance of crystallization), and the beeswax has been filtered out.

Chunk honey is liquid honey with chunks of honeycomb.

Dry honey is dehydrated, and can be sold as powder, flakes, granules, etc. Usually contains additives.

Creamed/whipped honey is intentionally crystallized to allow for spreading.

Organic honey must be produced without certain pesticides, insecticides, and herbicides. This is hard to control since bees can travel up to 2 miles from the hive to gather nectar and pollen. Only nontoxic paints can be used on the beehives and no medications can be used on the bees.

Fair trade honey: if you're getting honey from small local farmers, this won't be an issue. But if you are buying honey from outside the U.S., ensuring Fair Trade is important so beekeepers get proper compensation.

Single flower species honey comes from nectar gathered from a single flower (e.g. orange blossom or clover honey). This honey must contain at least 51% of the specific type of nectar to be labeled as such.

Honey is produced across the U.S., and there are over 300 varieties of American honey.

Natural honey is diverse. For instance:

Colour can depend on mineral, pollen and phenol content.

Honey is often cloudy due to air bubbles, pollen, or other particles.

The smell of honey depends on the amount and type of acids it contains.

The taste of honey varies from hive to hive and from year to year.

Different types of honey can vary 20 fold in their antioxidant content.

Honey is graded in the U.S. by the USDA based on a system accounting for water content, flavor, aroma, clarity, and absence of defects.

How honey is made

Honey is made from flower nectar.

Bees collect nectar from flowering plants, pollinating the plants in the process as they wiggle around in the flower. This makes bees crucial links in the food chain. For instances, 80% of cotton relies on honeybees. Many plants, such as squash, have specialized bees that only collect nectar from that particular plant.

A bee visits about 1,500 flowers to gather enough nectar to fill up her honey sac stomach (which holds about 70 mg of nectar - almost as much as a bees body weight), which is different than their digestive stomach.

Bees then carry the nectar back to the hive in their honey sac stomach. Here, a younger bee will suck the honey from the honey sac stomach, via the mouth (kind of like they are kissing).

Bees navigate using an exceptional spatial sense, and can fly up to 15 mph. Back at the homestead, they may do a little " bee dance " for their hive mates to communicate where the nectar was found.

The bees deposit (OK, regurgitate) the nectar into the waxen honeycomb, where invertase (aka sucrase) from salivary glands thickens it and splits sucrose into glucose and fructose, so that the bees are able to digest the honey when they consume it later.

Once honey is in the honeycomb, worker bees flap their wings to encourage water evaporation until the nectar fluid becomes syrupy. Then the bees cap the honeycomb with wax. If honey is harvested before the water is evaporated, moisture content will be too high and naturally occurring yeast cells will ferment. This honey will be runny and taste like vinegar.

A single worker bee makes less than a teaspoon of honey in her 6-week lifetime (assuming she doesn't sting anyone, as bees die after they sting). They work themselves to death, literally.

One colony can produce 44 pounds of honey during a typical summer. This requires more than 1 million foraging trips, and is roughly the amount necessary to sustain the colony during winter.

Why do bees produce honey?

Honey feeds the bee colony in the winter. Bees eat honey for carbohydrates and pollen for protein, vitamins and fat. Worker bees metabolize honey to generate heat for the hive, so it must be present at all times.

Just like you defend your lunch, bees defend their honey.

Bees can die of starvation during the winter without enough. Drones (male bees) are not allowed to spend the winter in the bee hive, as they would eat all the honey. Way to go, fellas.

Technically, honey is taken from the bees, which is why some folks try to avoid consuming it.

Beekeepers

There are between 140,000 and 212,000 beekeepers in the U.S. with 2.4 million honeybee colonies.

U.S. beekeepers can only supply 48% of American honey needs. The remaining 52% comes from outside the U.S., with a majority imported from Asian countries. Asian honey can be cheap, and it can also be contaminated with metals and antibiotics. (Read more about tainted and counterfeit Asian honey here and here)

A typical honeybee colony in the summer has 80,000 bees with one queen. Queens are marked by beekeepers for tracking.

"Educated" beekeepers don't remove honey from the main hive where the bees live, because bees eat this honey, and feed it to their larvae. Instead, beekeepers provide larger hives and harvest the excess honey. Beekeepers often feed bees a sugar water solution before the fall/winter to ensure the bees have enough stored honey.

Honey extraction and bottling

To access honey, beekeepers will use a one-way bee escape or a fume board (that smells like almonds). The bees often get defensive here. Beekeepers might also use smokers to neutralize odours and access hives.

Some modern industrialized beekeeping can subject honeybees to unnatural living conditions, genetic manipulation, and stressful transportation. To prevent swarms, some beekeepers clip the wings of bees.

Why do bees matter?

Before certain plants can grow they need to be pollinated. Bees (along with butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, bats, and wind) help transfer this pollen. 90% of pollination is performed by managed honeybees; beekeepers transport honeybee colonies to different agricultural areas depending on the need for pollination.

Thus, 1/3 of all food grown depends to some degree on honeybees. If honeybees were to go extinct, we (humans) probably wouldn't die off completely. But since honeybees are the most important pollinators worldwide, our food choices would be dismal. (Or we'd have to spend a lot of time out in the fields with Q-tips, poking flowers.)

Why are bee populations declining?

With more people, we need more food. To grow more food, we need more bees.

Bee populations are decreasing for many reasons:

the Varroa mite

Colony Collapse Disorder

insecticides (neonicotinoids)

chemicals

antibiotics

Artificial diets provided to bees might leave bees susceptible to illness and harassment from other insects (because honey that the bees would normally eat is harvested). These problems vary from region to region.

For more, see this useful infographic.

Ali's Potion & the health properties of honey

Muhammad Ali drank a mixture of honey, bee pollen and other ingredients before a 1978 fight. He claimed it helped. But beyond Muhammad's anecdote, does honey do anything for our health?

Indeed, honey has antiseptic, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, antifungal, antibacterial and prebiotic properties.

However, many studies use substantial amounts of honey (like 50 to 80 grams/day, which supplies 40-65 grams of sugar). Luckily, we can also derive health benefits from topically applied honey.

When comparing sweetener intake in rodents, honey appears to be less harmful than others (notice we said "less harmful" - because lots of any sweetener consumption tends to be harmful).

Skin

Honey can stimulate tissue growth, collagen and new blood vessels in wounds. It can also absorb moisture and fend off microbes. The antibacterial action of honey might be attributable to sugars, low moisture, gluconic acid (which creates an acidic environment), and hydrogen peroxide. Nitric oxide end products in honey might also be useful.

Allergies

Ingesting pure honey with traces of pollen may help build a better tolerance to local airborne allergens.

Sore throat & cough

Honey is said to soothe the throat and ease congestion. A large review concluded that honey is better than no treatment for acute cough symptoms, and sometimes as good as commercial cough syrups.

Gastrointestinal illness

Honey may relieve indigestion and other GI ailments, helping to destroy bad bacteria in the gut. It may also help to protect against gastric ulcers.

Workout recovery

Honey appears to act like other forms of rapidly digesting carbohydrates when it comes to athletic performance, recovery and promoting muscle growth. Honey has about the same amount of fructose as high fructose corn syrup and less than agave nectar (different varieties of honey vary slightly in their fructose content).

Honey gone bad

For food safety, store honey between 70 and 80 F in airtight containers.

Fermentation

Honey contains yeast cells. When honey has more than 19% water, the yeast cells divide and fermentation occurs.

This happens when beekeepers harvest honey too early or you get water/saliva in your honey storage container. If honey ever smells like vinegar, it's fermenting/fermented. Chuck it.

Mad honey

Some honey is toxic to humans. This "mad honey" is often found in the northern hemisphere in honey produced from rhododendrons, mountain laurels, oleander, and azaleas. The nectar of these plants may contain grayanotoxin (psychoactive and poisonous).

Luckily (for us, not for the bees), bees act as filtering agents and any toxic levels of chemicals brought back to the hive would kill the bees before reaching humans.

Local honey

Locally produced honey tends to contain more bacteria than commercially blended honey. This is probably because local honey undergoes less processing.

Teeth

Honey is bad news for cavities and dental erosion, comparable to table sugar, soda and juice.

Infants

Infants (less than 12 months old) should avoid honey due to the potential of Clostridium botulinum (aka botulism) bacteria to be present. Generally, adults' more robust digestive systems can destroy any bacteria.

Allergy

Reactions to honey are uncommon, still it's possible due to the pollen and proteins.

Toxic flowers

Toxic compounds occur in 3% of flowering plants and are harmful if ingested. Commercial honey blends with no floral attribution tend to contain more of these harmful compounds.

According to risk assessments, levels of these toxic compounds could cause chronic diseases such as liver cirrhosis, pulmonary hypertension and cancer, assuming you eat a lot of honey regularly (daily intake of 15-25 grams).

Honey & the environment

From an environmental perspective, locally sourced honey is likely a better choice than commercial sweeteners that undergo high levels of processing and longer transport distances. So if you must put something sweet in your tea, try a little local honey.

When using honey in a recipe, reduce the amount of any other liquid by ¼ cup for each cup of honey and add ½ teaspoon of baking soda for each cup of honey used. Reduce the temp of the oven by 25 F to prevent too much browning.

Summary & recommendations

Honey has been used throughout history because it was the only sweetener available.

Honey can be good for our skin, respiratory system, and GI tract. It has antiseptic, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibiotic, antifungal, antibacterial and prebiotic properties.

Chemically, honey is not much different than other sweeteners like agave nectar and maple syrup. It's still sugar. Use it sparingly.

Bees are important, both as honey producers and key links in food chains. If bees are healthy, our food system is healthy.

If you use honey, know your source. If you aren't sure you're getting local sustainable honey, another sweetener might be a better option.

Resources

Colony: The Endangered World of Bees. 2011. (DVD)
The Great Vegan Honey Debate
Apitherapy is the ancient practice of using bee venom and other products of the honeybees, including honey.

References

Click here to view the information sources referenced in this article.

Learn more

To learn more about making important improvements to your nutrition and exercise program, check out the following 5-day video courses.

They're probably better than 90% of the seminars we've ever attended on the subjects of exercise and nutrition (and probably better than a few we've given ourselves, too).

The best part? They're totally free.To check out the free courses, just click one of the links below.

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All About Honey & Bees | Precision Nutrition

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More than 200,000 people agree: Precision Nutrition is different. Our world-class experts have spent the last 15 years working 1-on1 with thousands of nutrition coaching and certification clients. With this research and experience, we've uncovered an exact formula for getting results.

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Honey is one of the oldest sweeteners on earth. Lucky for us, it also has many health benefits and uses. Honey is so good, we have included it in our list of powerfoods that should be in your kitchen right now. Read on for 10 health benefits and uses for this golden sweetener.

"My son, eat thou honey, for it is good " - King Solomon - Proverbs: 24:13

1. Helps prevent cancer and heart disease:
Honey contains flavonoids, antioxidants which help reduce the risk of some cancers and heart disease.

2. Reduces ulcers and other gastrointestinal disorders:
Recent research shows that honey treatment may help disorders such as ulcers and bacterial gastroenteritis. This may be related to the 3rd benefit...

3. Anti-bacterial and anti-fungal:
"All honey is antibacterial, because the bees add an enzyme that makes hydrogen peroxide," said Peter Molan, director of the Honey Research Unit at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. This contributes to the incredibly long shelf-life of honey.

4. Increases athletic performance:
Ancient Olympic athletes ate honey and dried figs to enhance their performance. This has now been verified with modern studies, showing that it is superior in maintaining glycogen levels and improving recovery time than other sweeteners.

5. Reduces cough and throat irritation:
Honey helps with coughs, particularly buckwheat honey. In a study of 110 children, a single dose of buckwheat honey was just as effective as a single dose of dextromethorphan in relieving nocturnal cough and allowing proper sleep.

6. Balances the 5 elements:
Honey has been used in Ayurvedic medicine in India for at least 4,000 years and is considered to affect all three of the body's primitive material imbalances positively. It is also said to be useful in improving eyesight, weight loss, curing impotence and premature ejaculation, urinary tract disorders, bronchial asthma, diarrhea and nausea.

Honey is referred as "Yogavahi" since it has a quality of penetrating the deepest tissues of the body. When honey is used with other herbal preparations, it enhances the medicinal qualities of those preparations and also helps them to reach the deeper tissues.

7. Helps regulate blood sugar:
Even though honey contains simple sugars, it is not the same as white sugar or artificial sweeteners. Its exact combination of fructose and glucose actually helps the body regulate blood sugar levels. Some honeys have a low hypoglycemic index, so they don't jolt your blood sugar. (Watch this video Sweetener Comparison where I compare stevia, brown rice syrup, honey, molasses and agave, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each.)

8. Heals wounds and burns:
External application of honey has been shown to be as effective as conventional treatment with silver sulfadiazene. It is speculated that the drying effect of the simple sugars and honey's anti-bacterial nature combine to create this effect.

9. Is probiotic:
Some varieties of honey possess large amounts of friendly bacteria. This includes up to 6 species of lactobacilli and 4 species of bifidobacteria. This may explain many of the mysterious therapeutic properties of honey.

10. Helps improve skin:
Its anti-bacterial qualities are particularly useful for the skin, and, when used with the other ingredients, honey can also be moisturizing and nourishing. For a powerful home beauty treatment for which you probably have all the ingredients in your kitchen already, read Carrot Face Mask.

There are at least 40 types of honey, and each one has a distinctive taste and unique properties. Different honeys have different flavonoid profiles, depending on the floral source of the nectar.

Types of Honey (most popular)

Darker honey tends to have higher antioxidant levels. Monofloral honey (honey from a single plant species) usually has the lowest glycemic index (GI). For example, locust honey from the Black Locust tree has a GI of 32. Clover honey, which is used commercially, has the highest glycemic index at 69.
Honey Suggestions:
To reap the most benefits from your honey, make sure it is pure and raw. Raw honey contains vitamins, minerals and enzymes not present in refined honey.
Honey Cautions:

Do not feed honey to infants. Spores of Clostridium botulinum have been found in a small percentage of honey in North America. This is not dangerous to adults and older children, but infants can have a serious reaction of illness in the first year. Do not add honey to baby food or use as a soother to quiet a fussy or colicky baby. Most Canadian honey is not contaminated with the bacteria causing infant botulism, but it's still best not to take the chance.

Honey is a sugar, so consume it in moderation. It has a high caloric value and will put you on a sugar high and low.

To cook with honey or not: There is some controversy about cooking with honey. While I personally have not found any problems with cooked honey, according to the Ayurveda Wellness Center, "when honey is heated above 108 degrees Fahrenheit, it becomes transformed into a glue-like substance that is extremely difficult to digest." When possible, try leaving honey raw.

I love my homemade dandelion flower pancakes topped with these healthy syrups (below). What are your favorite ways to enjoy honey?

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10 Health Benefits Of Honey | Care2 Healthy Living

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Honey is one of the oldest sweeteners on earth. Lucky for us, it also has many health benefits and uses. Honey is so good, we have included it in our list of powerfoods that should be in your kitchen right now. Read on for 10 health benefits and uses for this golden sweetener.