When I see cornfields these days, I cannot help but be grateful, for it is honey season and our bees are enjoying the corn flowers. The abundance of nectar source boosts honey production in our apiary. We started harvesting about three weeks ago and we are hopeful honey will continue to flow until the summer. It is a bee-sy season for our winged pets. A single colony can contain as many as 80,000 bees (workers, drones, and the queen) and those that are more than three weeks old are the field bees, traveling as far as five kilometers to forage for food (nectar) from flowers.

An amazing fact: a bee visits 50 to 100 flowers each trip and that a single bee visits up to 2 million flowers to make a pound of honey. By that time, it would have collected about 8 to 10 pounds of nectar. To turn this nectar into honey, the bees dehydrate the nectar up to a water content of 15 to 20 percent and “by adding a salivary enzyme that changes sucrose (long-chain sugar) into glucose and fructose (two short-chain sugars).”

Honey is a natural sweetener that has been used since ancient civilization both as food and medicine. It is mostly sugar (fructose and glucose) but it has also been found to contain traces of potassium, sulfur, chlorine, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, iron, copper and manganese and the vitamins riboflavin, panthothenic acid, niacin, thiamin, pyridoxin, ascorbic acid. Perhaps owing to these contents, honey is gaining significance for its antibacterial activity, and has been observed as effective in treating burns.

The quality depends on when it was harvested and on whether it was processed. The syrup must be aged in the comb so that by harvest time (when the honey is sealed with beeswax), water content is minimal and it will not ferment and turn sour over time. I often ask vendors selling honey in wet markets if these were gathered from the forests. See, gathering honey in the wild is finders keepers; people race to find honeycombs and use smoke to drive bees away so they can take the comb full of honey – whether aged or not. I have tasted honey that’s turning sour and now I know why.

Commercial honey production often involves processing the syrup using heat to remove water, prevent fermentation and crystallization, and prolong shelf-life; however, doing so kills all nutrients. Raw, unprocessed (not heat-treated) honey filtered using cheesecloth may contain small amounts of pollen and propolis as well as all the enzymes and nutrients that are usually killed by heat in processed honey. So commercially processed (cooked) honey is good only for cooking purposes. If you want to consume this natural sugar, use raw, unprocessed, uncooked honey. And it is best to buy from as close to the source as possible, to help make sure you’re buying raw, unprocessed honey.

Oh, and we’ve got some for sale.

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My bee-sy friends

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