Many of us love this sweet product. And of course, everyone knows about its healing properties, so it will be useful to learn some interesting facts about honey.
Interesting facts about honey
● Most honey is produced in China. But the most expensive honey is produced in Israel.
● Heat reduces the useful qualities of honey, so it should not be heated. Temperatures above 50 degrees completely remove all the useful properties of honey.
● A spoonful of honey a day will provide you with excellent prevention against colds, and cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases.
● To produce 100 grams of honey, a bee must fly over 100,000 flowers.
● In ancient Egypt and ancient Rome, honey was a great alternative to currency and could be easily paid for. Even in the Slavic books, it was said that fines could be paid either in cash, in cattle, or in honey.
● Very often archaeologists, excavating Egyptian tombs, found jars of honey from a thousand years ago, in which the honey was completely fresh and still useful. One of the main properties of honey is that it never spoils. If you follow the rules of storage, namely keep the lid closed and prevent water penetration, it can be stored forever!
● It is very difficult to establish the exact period of origin of honey, evidence of its existence goes back thousands of years. However, it is well known that some types of honey were extracted almost 20 million years ago!
● Depending on the location and the colors of the bees, honey can have significant differences in taste and color. In the United States alone, there are 300 different varieties of honey. The main reference point in the world of honey is color: the lighter the honey, the softer its taste, and the darker – the more saturated it is.
● Pure organic honey is full of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes that protect us from pathogenic bacteria and strengthen the immune system. Honey is often used for colds to overcome coughs and sore throats.
● Honey is the oldest anti-scratch agent. Its viscosity creates a protective barrier for wounds, antibacterial properties fight germs and viruses, and cuts heal very quickly.
● In order to collect 100 grams of honey, a bee needs to fly 46 thousand km, for comparison, this is the length of the equator.
● Interestingly, in the process of flying for honey, or rather on the way back, nectar serves as a kind of fuel for the bee. Thus, flying to flowers over long distances, the bee can bring back only 30% of the nectar – everything else will be spent on current needs.
● The word “honey” is of Jewish origin. Literally, it can be translated as “magic” or “endowed with magic”.
● Honey contains a lot of fructose, which helps to eliminate alcohol from the body. If you wake up in the morning after a grand party with a sore head, drink more tea with honey – this is a great weapon in the fight against a hangover!
● In 1985, Peruvian customs officers detained a large consignment of honey from Ecuador at the border. As it turned out, the treats contained cocaine. It later emerged that the drug had not been mechanically mixed. To obtain deadly honey, bees were released directly on coca plantations.
● Honey, by the way, is an excellent, albeit expensive preservative, which was known in ancient times. It is known that the body of Alexander the Great, who died during the campaign, was wrapped in honey during transportation to the Macedonian capital for burial to prevent decomposition during the long journey.
● Interestingly, unlike many foods, honey never molds. Despite the fact that honey contains proteins and carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and other substances necessary for the life and development of any living cell, mold fungi, which deliberately infected honey, died in it.
● There is an old way to quickly check honey for impurities. Take a match and soak it in honey, then set it on fire. If the honey is natural, the match will burn, if not, the honey will melt on the match.
● In ancient Greece, the immortality of the gods was explained by the fact that they ate ragweed, consisting of milk, nectar, and honey. Pythagoras, Hippocrates, and Aristotle believed that the consumption of honey promotes longevity.
● Beekeeping owes its existence to the “northern” bees, which harvest honey so that there is something to eat in winter. There are bees in Africa too, and they also process nectar into honey, but they don’t store it in hives because there is no winter in Africa, so you just don’t need to store honey.
● But still, most of the world’s honey is made in China. Moreover, the most popular Chinese honey is buckwheat.
● Honey that is obtained by pumping it out of the hives using a device called a honey extractor is called centrifugal. Most often, the word “honey” means centrifugal honey.
● Allergy to honey is a rather rare phenomenon. However, honey can be poisonous when bees collect nectar from plants that contain toxic substances. There are cases of mild poisoning with the use of honey collected by bees from the flowers of aconite and rhododendron. But, for example, blankety, hemlock, ba bee stings, and foxglove usually collect quite benign honey that does not cause pain.
● To obtain a spoonful of honey (30 g), 200 bees must collect nectar during the day. The same number of bees must be engaged in receiving nectar and processing it in the hive. At the same time, some bees ventilate the nest intensively to evaporate excess water from the nectar faster.
