Thursday 24 July 2014

Who or What is honey?


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.


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