If only bees could talk! They would undoubtedly rave about their products!! Imagine a product that is bacterial, anti inflammatory, anti cancer, and antioxidant properties—all in one! And from a product that tastes good and is “all natural”. It almost sounds too good to be true! But remarkably it’s not! The bees would probably be mad that we steal all of their gold and sell it for our profit and well-being, but then again maybe they made some of it for us!
So let’s talk honey! It is a remarkable substance, in addition to health benefits the bees work hard to make it! They have a “honey stomach” that they store the nectar in, when they get back to the nest, they mix it with their enzymes and regurgitate it several times before refining it into honey—this process takes about 20 minutes, and takes over a 1000 flowers to fill up their honey stomachs! Then the bees have this really cool way to heat up the honey, warm the water content, and then flap their wings create a supercooled environment to evaporate the remaining water and make the honey super dense! This process brings the water content to 15-18%, making it spoil-proof-unless you get water in it! Simply amazing! I mean we knew bees were amazing but did we really know HOW amazing they were? We just thought the hives we amazing!
So how beneficial is honey? A 2017 article from the National Institutes of Health done a vast search of research articles and literature to find uses of honey in medicine. It mentions that the oldest know use of honey goes back to 8000 BC in Spain to a cave painting of someone harvesting honey! So at least, 10000 years ago! After carbs, honey contains many nutrients! Proteins, vitamins, minerals, organic acids and amino acids. That’s a lot of stuff! There are over 320 different varieties of honey in the world and some have better uses than others. On average, an active hive will produce 65 pounds of honey a year.
Have I convinced you yet that honey is amazing and the BEES are even MORE amazing???? Hopefully I have, the next post will be on the benefits of honey. This post became long because I was so amazed by honey I could stop writing!! So now you are honey wise!
Come back for PART II!‘
Sources: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5424551/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey
Becoming Wellness Wise 