September is Honey Month

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September is Honey Month

 

" The only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey...

and the only reason for making honey is so I can eat it. " (Winnie the

Pooh)

 

Honey. It is sweet. It is timeless.

 

It is every flower in the middle of summer. It is a timeline into

history.

 

It is the only food that will never spoil.

 

It is comfort.

 

It is a yummy topping on toast. It is pure and unprocessed.

 

It is soothing in tea.

 

It is Aristotle's nectar of the gods. It is our memory bringing us

back in time to Winnie the Pooh's passion.

 

It is liquid gold. It is great in cooking. It is the only human food

produced by insects.

 

It is primarily composed of glucose, fructose, water, enzymes,

minerals,

 

and vitamins. It is delicious.

 

It is a lover's calling with a simple, " Honey, be mine. "

 

History speaks, did you know...

 

There are many legends surrounding honey, including the origin of the

word " honeymoon " . In Eastern cultures as a means of celebrating

their union, love and respect for one another, newlyweds would have a

spoonful of honey poured into their coupled palms.

 

The couple would then lick the honey off each other's hand. This

ensured

 

that the man would never raise a hand to his bride, and that she would

forever speak loving words to him. Legend also says that Cupid

dipped

his arrows in honey prior to striking lovers and thus the bee became

a symbol of Cupid. Peasants paid German feudal lords in honey during

the 11th Century. Honey was also thought to possess the strength to

mark a man a genius and forever happy. For this reason, certain

cultures still practice the tradition of lightly gracing a newborn

child's lips with the sweet nectar.

 

Egyptian hieroglyph's featuring bees were found in a temple built in

Cairo in 24,000 B.C. The Egyptians not only used honey as a

sweetener but also in embalming, for money, and as an offering to

their gods. The

 

bee continued to be important throughout Egyptian history; the

pharaoh of Lower Egypt during the First Dynasty (3,200 B.C.) used the

bee as his

 

emblem. Honey has been written about since the 21st Century B.C. in

Babylonian and Sumerian cuneiform writings as well as in India. The

ancient Assyrians, Babylonians, and Sumerians poured honey on

thresholds and some sacred objects for good luck.

 

Beekeeping was depicted in wall paintings found in Spanish caves,

dating back to 7,000 B.C. The Greeks and the Romans both offered

honey to the gods and their ancestors.

 

They also extensively used honey in their cooking. The importance of

honey is lauded in many of the classic Greek texts of Aristotle,

Plato, Hippocrates and others. The Romans were integral in spreading

honey throughout their empire. Honey was quickly absorbed into the

empire's culture, cooking and folklore.

 

In the Old Testament of the bible, the region now known as Israel and

Palestine was called " the land of milk and honey. " Beekeeping became

even more important once Christianity became a fully developed

religion due to the need for beeswax church candles. The bee was used

on Pope Urban VIII's insignia.

 

Napoleon believed that bee was a sign of power, emblazoning the bee

on his robes and flags.

 

Honey comes in three delicious varieties. Comb honey comes in its

natural form; honey in its wax comb. Both the honey and the wax are

edible.

 

Liquid honey is removed from the honeycomb by straining or

centrifugal force and it is free from any discernible crystals.

Whipped or creamed honey is liquid honey in its crystallized state.

The crystallization process is controlled so that honey can be spread

easily. The flavor of the honey is a result of the nectar of the

flowers the bees collect.

 

The flavors vary from fruity, woodsy, herby, aromatic, mild, or

spicy. The color also depends on the flower in which the bee collects

the nectar. Typically, the darker colored honeys are full bodied, and

the lighter colored honeys are mild.

 

Culinary Uses: You can replace honey for sugar in most recipes. Since

honey is sweeter than sugar, you will need to reduce the amount

called for in the recipe by about one-third. In addition, honey is

part water so you will need to reduce the liquid called for in the

recipe by one-fifth in baked goods. Honey browns quickly in the oven

so reduce the oven's temperature by 25 degrees in baked good recipes.

 

Honey helps to keep baked goods fresh longer because it retains

moisture. Honey helps keep vinaigrettes stable because of its

emulsifying qualities.

 

Busy as a Bee: The beehive runs like a well-organized manufacturing

plant. The bees have to take the nectar from about two million

flowers just to make one pound of honey.

 

A bee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers in one trip alone.

 

In order to get from flower to flower, the bee flies roughly 15 miles

per hour. Luckily each bee has four wings. After all this work, the

average bee only produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its entire

lifetime. When the bee gets back to the hive there is still a lot

for the bee to get done. Its home is a wax honeycomb and each cell

has six sides. When they want to communicate with their fellow bees,

they go dancing. They have numerous different dance moves, each

communicate a different signal: when the nectar is out, how far it is

to the nectar, and where the pollen is. There is a social order in

the hive in which a division of labor between the various bees is

set. The colony has one queen bee, 500 to 1,000 drone bees, and

between 30,000 to 60,000 worker bees.

 

The queen bee is fed on royal jelly and is the only sexually active

female bee in the hive. Drones are male bees without stingers and

their only purpose is to mate with the queen. A few weeks after

hatching the queen

 

mates once, receiving millions of sperm cells from the drones, which

will last for the entire two years of the queen's life. The queen

can lay 3,000 eggs in one day.

 

The worker bees are sexually undeveloped female bees. Their purpose

is to collect nectar, cool the hive by fanning their wings, make the

wax comb, clean the hive, feed the larvae, and guard the hive.

 

The worker bees also pollinate flowers. This is actually maybe their

most important purpose since bees pollinate about one-third of the

vegetables we eat. Pollination is the process of fertilizing a

flowering plant. Pollen is transferred by the bees from the anthers

of one flower to ovules another flower or sometimes that same flower.

 

Don't Feed it to Babies:

 

Babies under the age of one year should never be fed honey. Honey

can contain trace amounts of botulism spores. Babies have a

propensity to be

 

at risk to these spores because their immune system is undeveloped.