Friday, December 19, 2014

Honey


Honey is a food, used as a medicine and is an expression used to describe someone you love and care about.  Most people would imagine honey as a food rather than some of the other proposed uses.  However, honey for a brief period, lost its popularity and was simply used in medicine or only among the poor.  It is interesting how honey now is seen as the new super sweetener, health food and also good for the environment.  Honey is super at all its uses.

Honey itself begins with the bees.  Worker bees go out and suck nectar from different flowers and bring it back to the hive.  Once back at the hive, other worker bees will suck the nectar out of these gathering worker bees and chew it breaking down the complex sugar in the nectar into two simple sugars.  These two simple sugars are fructose and glucose.  The bees then expel the honey they have just chewed into wax combs that more worker bees have built.  Then more worker bees come and fan the honey that is now in the wax comb and this, along with the heat from the hive, evaporates most of the moisture from the honey.  The bees then cap this off with more wax and now it is ready for the beekeeper.
Here is a link to 18th century manuals on beekeeping. 

The history of honey gathering goes back millennia.  The first honey gathering would have been done by locating a beehive.  The next step would be to simply reach in and pull out the honey comb.  People then began developing other ways of keeping bees so they could get honey in a way that didn’t involve getting stung so many times.  The first breakthrough with bee keeping was the realization that smoke relaxes the bees and keeps them from stinging the person trying to get the honey. From this discovery forward, it is only the design of the manmade beehive that distinguishes them through the centuries.  The first manmade beehives known were made in Egypt.  They were clay cylinders open on both ends.  When the bee keeper wanted honey, he would smoke the bees at one end.   They would then fly to the other end of the cylinder, leaving their honey unguarded and easily removed.  The next method was to use baskets to keep the bees.  These baskets were called bee skeps.  Initially these baskets were made of wicker, were covered with mud, open at one end and tapered upward.  Then the baskets started to be made only with grass in the same design as the wicker ones.  One of the final methods of gathering honey is similar to the earliest method.  Hives would have been located in a tree.  A piece of wood surrounding the hive would have been cut out and some of the honey comb would have been removed.  You would then cover the hive back up with that same piece of wood and come back whenever you wanted for more honey. 
German print showing gathering honey from the trees.
If you look close enough you can see one of the men is smoking a pipe to relax the bees.

 
Bee Skep Basket at Colonial Williamsburg
 
                In medieval Europe, honey was the primary sweetener because sugar was so expensive.  It was used to sweeten baked goods, to candy fruits like orange and lemon peel and used to brew a beverage called mead.  (Mead is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting a mixture of honey and water with yeast.)  Using honey in this way continued for centuries.  With the discovery of the Caribbean and with the drastic drop in price of sugar, honey became obsolete among most in the 18th century.   It was then that honey was used more for medicinal purposes than for food like treatments for hooping cough and for tooth aches.  Today honey is still a good option for medicinal uses.  Honey is naturally antiseptic and can kill bacteria if applied to a wound.  It has also been learned that if you eat locally produced honey, it can help improve your allergies.


In the New World, the Aztecs were keeping a species of bee that is different from the bee of today’s North America.  They kept a stingless bee that was native to South and Central America.  The first honey bees that were brought over from Europe and released in the Americas were at City Point, Virginia in 1622.  By 1820, they had populated all the way from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
 The dates we can record honey bees in these different states.
 
In the end, honey is a very universally versatile product.  The bees are so proficient that there is no need for people to change anything for it to be used.  It is an original farm-to-table (in this case, the hive-to-table) product.  So support your local farmer and enjoy the honey!       

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