Secrets of the Honey Bees

Honey is a nourishing product created by honey bees. It is in addition a focal ingredient in numerous folk remedies, wellness and beauty products and other functional applications.

The thick, sweet liquid is made by bees and contains the insects' enzymes, as well has sugars, water and oil.

Honey bees fly to flowers and extract the nectar from the plants using their tongues. (Who knew bees had tongues?) The honey is hived away within the bees' bodies. After a bee travels to plenty of flowers to acquire its fill, it comebacks to the hive and regurgitates the nectar, which is ingested by bees that are not active in the accumulation process.

The enzymes within the trunks of these "house bees" vaporize much of the water in the nectar, producing honey. The processed liquid is laid in in honeycomb cells inside the hives and is utilized for nutrition by all the bees in the colony.

Luckily, separate bee hives create a lot more honey than is really needed for the colony's survival. The honey matures within the honeycomb and finally becomes a appetizing and consumable product with a assortment of additional uses.

A Little History of Honey

Honey has been around far longer than the little soft plastic bear containers we might have in our kitchen pantry! It's inconceivable to say how long people have been accumulating and eating honey since even our earliest historical records show that we have savoured the work of honey bees.

Cave paintings thought to have been made in or around 7000 BC demonstrate that bee keeping has been around for a very long time. Honeybees predate that record by centuries, though. Fossils demonstrate that bees were exercising their magic over 150 million years ago, which implies that even the earliest people might have had use of honey.

We acknowledge that ancient Egyptians held bees in specially created bee hives. The honey bee has frequent appearances in Egyptian hieroglyphics and was oftentimes used as a symbol of royal line as far back as 2400 BC.

The Egyptians employed honey in a assortment of capacities. It was, naturally, used to sweeten food and beverage. It was as well applied as an component in embalming fluids and was provided to the gods as a sacrifice!

The development of Christianity, contributed to an increased need for beeswax for church candles. Honey as well grew in popularity as a sweetener.

The attraction of honey proceeded to grow, through the Renaissance. At that time, though, refined sugar from different parts of the world became more common and the use of honey went into decline. By the 1600s, sugar was really used more frequently than honey as a sweetener.

Honey production, however, did not die. Beeswax continued to be a important commodity and honey was still the favorite sweetener of many people and substantial numbers acknowledged the useful medicinal and health-related properties of honey.

Honey remains to be an significant ingredient in a good deal of cooking, its comparative wellness superiority and the revival in interest in traditional practice of medicine and healing is also hopeful to the honey industry.