Let’s Learn About Honey
Humans have used honey for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians were skilled beekeepers and packed honey into the tombs of their pharaohs to take to the afterlife. Beeswax from 8000 BC has been found preserved in pots in Turkey. Rock art in Spain shows humans harvesting honey around 6000 BC. That ancient Egyptian honey? You can eat it today (but don’t, it’s a treasured archaeological find) because honey never, ever goes bad.
Honey is one of nature’s most amazing substances:
It has fewer calories than sugar (not many, but fewer; honey is not a low-calorie food).
It contains trace amounts of botulinum toxin, which causes botulism and is one of the chief ingredients in Botox. Never give honey to kids under 1 years old, as this toxin can be digested by our stomachs but not by babies’ stomachs.
It offers us antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals – like vitamins B3, B5, and C, folate, choline, betaine, even a few amino acids and some protein – albeit in tiny amounts. But, if you’re going to be having sugar anyway, have honey instead! It’s definitely better for you.
It has pretty strong (medically verified here and here) antibacterial properties, which make it great for helping treat burns and other skin lesions – like eczema, acne, cuts, bites, etc. – in addition to soothing sore throats.
Is it good for allergies? Well. Anecdotal evidence suggests that local honey contains trace amounts of pollen that can help your body acclimate to springtime allergens. Is it true? Well. I like to believe that it is, and sometimes that belief is all your body needs to make it real. But is it true, Amber?! I mean … maybe. Medical studies say no, but so many people swear by it that they can’t all be wrong.
How’s it made? Well, from start to finish (flower to tea), honey goes through quite a little journey:
Bees suck the nectar from flowers through their proboscis (imagine if your mouth had an attached straw) into a special sac that acts like a second stomach but isn’t. Here, enzymes break it down and change its base molecules into simpler sugars, adding acid and making it not a great place for bacteria to live.
The bee carries the nectar back to the hive, sipping on it a little for energy as it flies, and … well, they don’t barf it up (since the sac isn’t really a stomach at all), but out the nectar comes. It gets passed from bee to bee by their little mouth straws. Each time, the honey moves deeper into the hive and has its water content reduced and its acidity increased.
The final bee in the line deposits the liquid – now not quite nectar and way too watery to be honey – into a little well in the comb. Other bees gather round and buzz their wings, drying it out and thickening it. When it’s thick enough, the water content is lowered, and the acidity is raised to a point at which it is now an immortal liquid and can sustain no bacterial life at all, it’s officially called honey.
The bees cap the little well in the comb with beeswax to make sure the honey doesn’t leak out. When they need to eat it for energy or reproduction, they break the seal and suck it into their real stomachs.
This is where humans step in and take a little rent from the bees. They produce honey from spring to fall, so we take just enough so the bees can still live on their own honey stores. Some beekeepers will take it all, but that’s the bees’ food too! We should really only take what we can without disrupting the hives too much.
As is the Mad Russian process, we take the whole frame of comb out of the hive and, using various methods that are all super messy and not at all efficient, we shave off the top of the beeswax caps. Then, we put the entire frame (without the bees, which have been shaken off) into a honey spinner that uses centrifugal force (1980s playground merry-go-rounds) to drain all the honey while not damaging the comb itself. The honey splatters against the stainless steel walls of the spinner then drains down into the distribution tub. We open the faucet at the bottom of this tub, and out pours the honey. Slowly.
Let’s pause here. Honeycomb is intensely cool to look at, and some people enjoy eating it. In some restaurants and specialty stores, the comb is considered a delicacy. No. Look at me. NO. It takes the bees 4x the resources to make the comb as it takes them to make the honey. When you remove the comb, you’re stressing out the bees and forcing them to start from scratch every time you harvest. Instead of focusing their efforts on making us all more honey, they’re focusing on rebuilding their house. NO. Stop it.
OK, back to processing. Up until this point, most everyone’s harvest methods are the same, with variations in technology only (we spin ours by hand, some people use an electric motor). But, now is the step in the process that matters the most to you: What happens to the liquid gold as it comes out of the spinner?
At Mad Russian Apothecary, we allow the honey to drain once through a filter wide enough to catch only residue beeswax (which is not delicious) and various bee parts (fascinating but also not delicious). Then we pour it into labeled bottles for sale. That’s it. That’s all we do. Others may ultra-filter it, which pulls out a lot more of the solid matter, giving the honey a smoother texture but negating some of the health benefits we already talked about. Others still, like the large-scale producers you find in the grocery store, will heat the honey to homogenize it across batches. This kills pretty much everything beneficial and makes it honey-flavored sugar syrup.
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about what kind of packaging we use for our honey. This is the most recent change at Mad Russian Apothecary and, to be honest, the point of this blog. Congrats for making it to the end!
Everyone loves a squeezy bottle for their honey. Pop the top, squeeze the plastic, close it up – no mess, no fuss. Right? Well, plastic actually isn’t great for honey. It lets in microscopic air and water molecules that crystalize the honey. This isn’t really a “problem” per se because all you have to do to liquify the honey again is set it in a pot of warm water for a few minutes (not long enough to heat the honey and kill all the good stuff). But once a crystal forms, it wants to form again, so you might be stuck doing this over and over. It’s what you get when you buy local raw honey – but, we have found a workaround that we feel outweighs the drawbacks.
We, at Mat Russian Apothecary, as stewards of our environment and caretakers of our bees, we take this seriously. We are switching to glass bottles for all our honey. YES, I know it’s messier. But, glass is less porous than plastic, so you’ll have less problems with crystallization. It’s a controversial decision that we made with YOU in mind. So, from now on, you’ll get your MRA honey in glass bottles, and it’ll be better for you than ever. You’re welcome. Now go lick the honey off your fingers like a civilized person.
NOW, IT’S TIME TO TRY OUR HONEY FOR YOURSELF:
