What is Honey Anyway?
Honey would be a real good reason to keep honey bees. Honey,
after all, is one of the sweetest, all-natural foods, God ever
created. So what makes honey so sweet? The sugars of course. The
primary sugars in honey are: glucose, sucrose, and fructose. Bees
will fly up to three miles away to collect the nectar from which
they make their honey. Nectar is collected by the forager bee and
carried back to the hive in a special organ called the honey stomach.
In the hive it is deposited into one of the honey storage combs and
left there for other worker bees to process into honey. During the
honey making process, enzymes are added to the nectar which break
down most of the sucrose sugars into glucose and fructose. While the
enzymes are working to break down the sugars, the bees are busy
ventilating the hive to draw off the moist air which in turn
dehydrates, or removes, 50 to 90 percent of the water found in
nectar.
Ever wonder why honey never spoils?? Well, it's more of those
enzymes from the worker bees. Honey is the only natural food product
you don't have to add preservatives too, refrigerate, or otherwise
provide special handling for, so it doesn't spoil. You can leave
honey on the shelf for years and it may never go bad. It may
crystallize, but that doesn't hurt a thing. You can re - dissolve
the sugar crystals back into the honey, simply by warming it in a
pot of boiling water or in the microwave.
What Makes One Honey Different From Another??
There's more to honey than sugar, water and enzymes! If that were the
case, we could make honey ourselves. What makes one type of honey
different from another is, of course, the nectar. For, not all
nectar is created equal. Nectar will vary from one kind of plant to
another, each producing different combinations of sugars, fragrances,
and proteins. All designed to attract various pollenaters. It's not
necessarily the honey bee, the plant had evolved to attract, either. Did you
know the honey bee, we all know and love today came from Europe?? and
is known as the Italian Honey Bee? The honey bees we keep today
have had to adapt to collecting nectar from plants they would never
have encountered in their natural habitat! Had they not been able to
adapt so well, honey would only be food for the gods, and the very
rich. So each type of plant produces it's own special nectar to entice
it's pollinators to visit. As a result, we get different kinds of
honey from different kinds of plants. Some types of honey are very
light in color, like that from the Black Locus tree. Others trees like the
Tulip Poplar make a very dark-almost black honey. In fact that's one way honey is graded
by the honey industry-by it's color.
Some colonies of bees produce more honey than others. This is a
genetic trait that can be bred into a colony of bees. In fact, if a
particular colony of bees is not producing to the beekeepers
satisfaction, the queen can be removed and replaced by a new queen
from a more prosperous hive. An interesting story can be told of how
a group of scientists, studying the production of honey in Africa,
discovered the potential of a strain of bees that could collect
three times the amount of honey than our common Italian honey bee.
Unfortunately these bees were quite aggressive and had a tendency to
abscond (or relocate elsewhere) rather frequently. This group of
scientists tried to breed these bees with our docile Italian honey
bee in an attempt to develop a honey bee that was both docile
AND highly productive. As the story goes, the funding for
this study ran out and the bees were left to fend for themselves.
consequently, the bees escaped and headed north to become what we know
today as the Africanized Honey Bee
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