A drop of honey!

Honey - the sweet nectar of life!

We have often used the phrase “you are as sweet as honey”, but did you ever wonder how is honey made or what are it’s benefits? Or are they any different forms of honey, or is it just one type of honey sold in the market?

Honey is that sweet, sticky food substance made mainly by honeybees and some other bees too. Bees produce honey from the sugary secretions of plants, or floral nectar; or from the secretions of other insects such honeydew. The variety of honey produced by honeybees is best known due to its commercial production

and human consumption. Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from hives of domesticated bees. This practice is known as beekeeping or apiculture.

Honey gets it’s sweetness from glucose and has the same degree of sweetness as table sugar or sucrose.

Honey has attractive chemical properties for baking and a distinctive flavor when used as a sweetner. Most micro=organisms do not grow in honey, so sealed honey does not spoil even after thousands of years, thus making it a long term stored food.

Honey is classified by the floral source of nectar from which it was made. It can be made from specific types of flower nectars or can be blended after collection. The pollen found in honey is traceable to it’s floral source and therefore it’s region of origin.

The honey that is widely and commercially available is blended honey, which is a blend or mix of two or more honeys, differing in floral source, color, flavor, density or geographic origin.

Polyfloral honey, also known as wildflower honey is derived from the nectar of many types of flowers, which may make the taste and aroma vary from less intense to more, depending on the blooming flowers.

Monofloral honey is made from the nectar of one type of flower. Monofloral honeys have distinct flavors and colours because of it’s difference between their nectar sources. Thus, we can have orange blossom, cherry, blueberry, honeysuckle, jamun, citrus and many other flavours of monofloral honeys.

There are a couple of medicinal benefits of honey. It can be used on wounds, burns, as an antibiotic and the most common usage is that it is a good remedy for cough especially when mixed with ginger.