One of my lecturers at the University would always ask his question like this 'who or what is ...? I am sure some people might call a person 'honey' and others that sweet substance. I am sure this post will firther answer a couple of those question you have.
Honey is the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honey comb to ripen and mature.
Field honey bees collect
flower nectar. On entering the hive with a full honey sac, which is an
enlargement of the oesophagus, the field bee regurgitates the contents into the
mouth of a young worker, called the house, or nurse, bee. The house bee
deposits the nectar in a cell and carries out the tasks necessary to convert
the nectar to honey. When the honey is fully ripened, the cell is sealed with an
airtight wax capping. Both old and young workers are required to store the
winter supplies of honey.
Nectar is averagely about
80% moisture and 20% sugars. The bees collect this and add to it several other
components in their stomach as you must have noticed above that honey will
qualify as bee vomit; Yook! Fear not, these substances are what make honey like
no other sugar with such much to offer. They then will reduce the moisture
content to about 20% and the sugars plus other beneficial substances to about
80%. 80/20 rule enh!
I may now in Chemistry
registers define honey as a supersaturated solution. I would like you to keep
this in mind as it will be the core of our discussion when we talk about honey
and crystallization. You know that white stuff you see under your jar of honey
when you store your honey slightly below room temperature.
What intrigues me most is the work that the bees
have to do that I might enjoy just a spoonful of this sweet healthy substance. The average honey bee will actually make only one
twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime as it takes It takes about 556
workers to gather 1 pound (0.45359kg) of honey from about 2 million flowers. I guess we have so much to learn from
them when it comes to
work ethics and even our social structure. Let us leave that for a rainy day.
It is healthy to know
that honey contains only about 1.3% sucrose, 38% fructose and about 31%
glucose. What this means is that honey is very okay for diabetic patients.
There are so many other applications of honey for nutritional and preservative
purposes. Its health benefits cannot be exhausted, ranging from ulcers to cosmetics
to medicines just to mention a few. For those of us that are quite spiritual
the holy books say it all.
In Matthew 3:4, John the Baptist is said to have lived for a long period of time in the
wilderness on a diet consisting of locusts and wild honey.
In Islam, there is an entire Surah in the Qur'an called al-Nahl (the Honey Bee). According to hadith, Prophet Muhammad (SAW) strongly recommended honey for healing purposes. The Qur'an promotes
honey as a nutritious and healthy food.
“And your Lord inspired the
bee(s), saying: "Take your habitations in the mountains and in the trees
and in what they erect. (68) Then, eat of all fruits, and follow the ways of
your Lord made easy (for you)." There comes forth from their bellies, a
drink of varying colour wherein is healing for mankind. Verily, in this is
indeed a sign for people who think”
As good as it is there is
one key don’t with honey, please DONT GIVE TO A BABY LESS THAN A YEAR OLD. It
may cause a death. The presence of endospores of the bacterium. I know especially in the Yoruba culture
of Nigeria this will come with fierce resistance. I am yet to get samples of
Nigerian honey to specialised labs that will help to identify this bacterium if
it does exist in her honey samples.
