Honey - A Source Of Health And Longevity

Honey can be an indispensable food on everyone's menu. Honey is a food viscous, liquid or crystallized product produced by honey bees from the nectar of flowers or secretions on living parts of plants, which bees collect, transform and combine with specific substances that they secrete, store and mature in wax combs. .

Nectar and manna are sources of honey. They originate from the so-called. phloem juice of higher plants, which contains 15-25% dry matter. About 90% of its content is carbohydrates. Their type and quantity depends on the climatic conditions, the type of plant, etc.

 

Natural honey in its taste and nutritional qualities is one of the most valuable food products known since ancient times. It is completely absorbed by the body, as up to 3400 calories of energy are absorbed from 1 kilogram of honey. The relative weight of honey is 1.4 (the volume of 1 kg of water replaced with honey weighs 1.4 kg).
  

Naturally, the property of honey is to crystallize sooner or later. In our country this phenomenon is called sugaring and such honey is viewed with distrust. But in some far more developed European countries, crystallized honey is better accepted on the market, because it is certain that the water content is not more than 18%, and all other properties are preserved. Crystallized honey has another advantage - it mixes better with other preparations in the preparation of medicines.
 

Difficulties are encountered with liquid methods for preparing medicinal mixtures with honey due to the difference in the relative weight of the ingredients and their deposition in layers. You can make sure of this by mixing two types of honey, for example light acacia and dark pine (relative weight of dark honey is greater and it will separate at the bottom of the vessel, while acacia honey will remain above the pine).
 

Depending on its origin, honey is divided into:

• nectar honey - bee honey obtained from plant nectar
• Nectar is an aqueous solution of sugars and usually contains sucrose, glucose and fructose in different proportions, which is directly related to environmental conditions. The nectar contains various substances, of which: sugars 3-80%, small amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds, organic acids, vitamins, pigments, aromatic substances, mineral salts, enzymes and amino acids.
• manna honey, which is of two types:
• manna - a product obtained mainly from the excreta of sucking insects on plants (Hemiptera)
• honeydew - a product obtained from the secretions of living parts of plants - leaves and young twigs (plant mange).
• Freshly separated manna is colorless, but in the air it quickly darkens and thickens.
• mixed honey - a product obtained by mixing nectar and manna from bees.

Processing the nectar into honey

 
The worker bees (collectors) suck the sweet juice (nectar or manna) with their proboscis and collect it in their honey stomach, releasing several enzymes that are the basis for processing the nectar into honey.

The bee carries the collected and enzyme-enriched nectar in its honey stomach to the hive. There he passes it on to one or more beehives. They move it repeatedly from their honey stomach to the proboscis and thus evaporate the water from the nectar.
 

When the water content decreases to 35-40%, the bees place it in small droplets on the walls or bottoms of the cells, gradually filling them. 

Thanks to the active ventilation in the hive, the evaporation of water continues and when its content in the nectar reaches 15-20 / 21%, and the amount of sucrose under the action of enzymes reaches 5%, the nectar is already honey. 

The bees then complement the cells and seal them with a wax cap, which prevents honey from absorbing moisture. It takes 1-3 days to process the nectar into honey, depending on the water content, temperature, humidity in the hive, the strength of the bee colony and the inflow of nectar.