INTRODUCTION
You know bees make honey. And you know honey is delicious. You’ve probably used it to sweeten tea, maybe drizzled it on a biscuit or some toast here and there, and also . . . well, okay, mostly in tea, right? But I’ll let you in on a little secret: Honey is so much more than just a sweetener. It is, as a matter of fact, liquid magic—deliciously complex, full of nutritional and medicinal benefits—a real powerhouse with scores of amazing uses both in and out of the kitchen.
Indeed, using honey on the regular will change your life and—thanks to the amazing work of bees—benefit the planet. Sounds like an overstatement, I know, but I assure you it is not. As a working mom with a talent for juggling that is not quite on par with the number of balls I have in the air at any given moment, I love honey for its everyday problem-solving capacity. Honey is my go-to for so many things all over the house that my kids probably think Winnie the Pooh is a not-so-distant relative.
As a chef, I often turn to honey for its unique flavor and texture, both of which transform salad dressings, sauces, savory dishes, desserts, and cocktails—adding depth, complexity, and natural sweetness to dishes of all kinds. Honey can balance strong or acidic flavors like nobody’s business. And while the simplicity of a spoonful of honey in (yes) tea is comfort epitomized, there’s also a lot of powerful science behind how and why it heals and helps us feel better when we’re under the weather. Seriously, how many tasty ingredients can you think of that can heal a wound, ease a sore throat, calm an upset stomach, boost your energy, nourish your body, and give you the complexion of a Hollywood starlet? Not many, I bet—but honey can do all that and more.
Rich in vitamins and minerals, and with antioxidant and antibacterial properties, honey has been shown to soothe ulcers, burns, skin sores, and inflammation. It’s an amazing beauty treatment, natural digestive aid, sugar alternative, allergy treatment, energy invigorator, skin salve, and topical antiseptic. And studies have shown that honey does a better job of easing nighttime coughs and improving sleep than do many popular cough suppressants. So . . . take that, spoonful of sugar! Better yet, honey is easy to find, easy to use, and keeps—literally—forever, so you can bulk-shop the heck out the stuff and always have enough on hand for whatever you’re up to. And to prove it, here’s your comprehensive guide to the many diverse and delicious ways you can use honey every day to enhance your life.
In other words, it’s all about how honey is the bee’s knees.
A Brief History of Honey
Honey has been around for a long time. Like, 100 million years long. It’s basically as old as history is itself. Although there are cave paintings in Spain that suggest people have been harvesting it for 8,000 years, give or take, scientists believe that beekeeping as we know it began in earnest in ancient Egypt around 2500 BCE. Since then, honey’s magical properties and usefulness have given it a noteworthy place in history, as humans have eaten it, bathed in it, treated their wounds with it, traded it, and even paid their taxes with it (really!).
In ancient Greece and Rome, honey was not just food and medicine, but symbolized fertility, love, and beauty. In Egypt, archaeologists discovered honey that had been buried with other valuables in King Tut’s tomb alongside his body; 3,000 years later, the honey was perfectly preserved and completely edible. (Wouldn’t you love to know who got to taste it? My money’s on the intern.) According to myth, Cupid used to dip his arrows in honey to fill a lover’s heart with sweetness. In Greece, even now, it is customary for a bride to dip her finger into honey for a sweet life. Honey is also traditionally eaten on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, to bring sweetness and good fortune in the year ahead. And honey’s usage in many modern Italian recipes is a vestige of its importance in ancient Rome all those years ago.
Fast-forward to the 1100s and people were eating a lot of freaking honey! This was before sugar came on the scene; it is estimated that Europeans were chowing down on about 4½ pounds of honey per year to satisfy their sweet tooth. When the United States was colonized, settlers actually brought honeybees with them to be used as a free source of sugar. Sometime after World War II, people learned about the importance of honeybees in pollinating crops and began to incorporate uses for honey in modern medicine. Even so, by the turn of the 20th century, honey had finally become eclipsed by sugar. Sugar mills had started to pop up in the 1400s and, although it started out as such a rare commodity that it was considered a fine spice, sugar steadily gained speed and popularity. Over time, honey consumption dropped to less than ½ pound per person per year. Interestingly, however, according to latest data from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), honey use has risen again in recent years—perhaps due to better education and shifting taste preferences—with an annual average of nearly 1 pound of honey consumed per person, even as consumption of other caloric sweeteners has been steadily falling. So, long story short—honey has stood the test of time (and time again).
The Busy Life of Bees
What Is Honey and Where Does It Come From?
Inside every beehive is a buzzing, bustling factory where honeybees transform flower nectar into the sweetest elixir on earth. Despite the thousands of honey varieties in the world, the bees’ recipe for honey never changes and the organization chart, lines of communication, complex method of nest construction, defense strategy, and division of labor within the hive always stays constant.
First, let’s understand who inhabits a beehive. Each colony is made up of three kinds of adult bees: workers, drones, and a queen, each with a clearly defined role within bee civilization.
The thousands of female worker bees are responsible for collecting nectar and pollen, raising the offspring, maintaining optimal hive temperature, gathering food, cleaning house, building the honeycomb, producing wax and royal jelly, defending the hive, serving the queen, and, in all likelihood, driving to soccer practice and making dentist appointments. They don’t typically lay eggs because, good gracious, they can’t do everything! But, they are laser-focused on getting the job done, working from sunrise to sunset. Every. Single. Day. Of their (6-week-long) lives. #girlpower
The few hundred drones (male bees) live in late spring and early summer and are around mainly for the purpose of mating with their queen. They are larger than worker bees, have no stinger, produce no wax, collect no pollen, and must be fed and cared for by the worker bees. Kind of like that high-maintenance dude your roommate dated after college who paid no rent, slept over every night, ate all of your communal food, and—after a few months of sleeping with her—was never seen or heard from again. The difference in the case of bees is that the rest of the colony tolerates drones because their contribution is critical to the survival of the hive.
The ten or so drones that do get a chance to fertilize the queen are in for the surprise of a lifetime when it happens because they die as soon as the deed is done! After he mates with her, the queen rips off the drone’s most personal piece of equipment and then he immediately falls to his death. As for the drones that don’t get to mate with a queen, come winter . . . they get kicked out. Where do they go? Well, for the most part they just sort of hang around, pathetically hoping they’ll be invited back into the hive. But, nope. They don’t get to come back in and, eventually, they die. Boy, bye!
Although there is only one queen in a colony of bees that may number as many as 60,000 or more, she is fundamental to everything that happens within a healthy hive. She is, unsurprisingly, the largest bee in the colony and the star of the kingdom, because of her exclusive ability to lay eggs. How many eggs? She will produce about 1,500 to 2,000 a day. A day. That’s about one egg every 20 to 30 seconds!
In her lifetime, a queen bee will produce more than her own body weight in eggs. That’s effectively a lifetime of permanent PMS, which is why it’s completely reasonable that she lives a fairly indulgent lifestyle. When she is one week old, the queen will leave the hive, take several flights to mate with 10 to 20 drones, then come home to lay her eggs, binge-watch old episodes of Full House, and never, ever leave the house again. Can you blame her?
After one season of mating, she has enough sperm inside her to continue to fertilize for the rest of her life! And while she’s busy makin’ babies, thanks to the amazing cooperation and democracy within bee society, the other bees tend to her every need because she physically cannot take care of herself. Her role is to move from cell to cell, laying all those eggs. So, her tireless attendants feed her, groom her, carry away her waste, and even digest her food for her. (Yeah, I know! A queen does not have the anatomy to digest her food, which is why it is predigested and then fed to her.) Although laying eggs is her main gig, she also produces chemicals that guide the behavior of the other bees. These chemicals are called pheromones, and they’re crucial to keeping the business of bee life on track.
So, then, how do bees make honey? Well, it all goes back to those busy worker bees that fly for miles and miles to collect nectar from 100 to 150 flowering plants. They suck the nectar out of flowers with their crazy-long tubular tongue and store it in a special honey stomach (different from their food stomach). When they have a full load, they fly back to the hive, where they pass on the nectar through their mouth to processor worker bees who gnaw on it for about half an hour, adding an enzyme called invertase that breaks down the sucrose portion of the nectar. Then, they pass it on to another processor, who in turn passes it on again.
It’s passed around and around, until it eventually becomes a very wet, sweet substance (it’s about 70% water), at which point it is stored in the little hexagonal wax cells of the honeycomb—like teensy little honey pots! Since the honey is still quite watery, the bees fan it with their wings to help it dry out and become a sticky substance containing about 18 percent water. Once the nectar has ripened into honey, the processor bees “cap” the cell with an airtight wax seal made from wax flakes they excrete from their abdomen—and presto! The honey is ready for bees to feed on all year round—and fortunately for us, they usually make more than they need, so we can have some, too.
Sweet fact: It takes at least eight bees all their life to
make one single teaspoonful of honey.
The Importance of Honeybees and How to Keep Them Safe
Bees and all that they symbolize have been long loved through the ages, depicted and celebrated in art, song, ceremony, poetry, spirituality, structural design, and philosophy, because we humans figured out early on about the big, important contribution bees make to our world. Sure, they produce glorious, golden honey, which is awesome and all, but in the process of doing that they contribute something even more unbelievably beneficial for humanity and the environment—they pollinate! Why is this so important? Well, because without pollination, nothing would grow and we’d have no fruits, vegetables, berries, nuts, leaves, roots, or seeds. And if you think that sounds like a big problem, consider the fact that farmers rely on honeybees to pollinate many of the crops that feed their livestock—without bees to pollinate such plants as clover and alfalfa, we’d have no meat, eggs, cheese, or milk. Even coffee is pollinated by bees.
So you see, honeybees (and wild bees) play a pretty pivotal role in the whole food chain. And the contribution of bees reaches even further than food and flowers. Bees also pollinate many trees, which support wildlife, help even out soil composition and landscapes, and are our planet’s lungs. So, yeah, you could say they’re important.
Now, I have good news and bad news. I’ll quickly get the bad news over with so we can get back to the Yay-for-the-Bees party: Bees are in trouble. Climate change, habitat loss, pesticides, and disease are wreaking havoc with them. Every year in the United States, colonies lose an average of 30 to 40 percent of their population. Talk about a buzzkill (sorry—couldn’t help myself). The good news: There are things you can do to help make our world a great place for honeybees and other wild pollinators—and you don’t necessarily have to become a beekeeper (though you could!). Here are the top five ways you can help save the bees:
1. Plant a bee-friendly garden. Native plants provide great sources of nectar and pollen (both food for the bees and butterflies). And while you’re at it, ditch weeding (tell the truth: you didn’t want to weed your garden anyway, did you?). Many plants—dandelion, for example—are an excellent source of food for bees. In early spring, those “weeds” are often the only source of food for beneficial insects. (See more tips concerning this on page 192.)
2. Don’t use pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides on plants. They become contaminated with the chemicals, which will likely reach the bees and kill them.
3. Put out a water source for the bees. A shallow birdbath or even a dish near your flowering plants will do the trick. Just be sure to put a few stones or floating cork on the water, so the bees won’t drown!
4. Learn how to become a beekeeper or adopt a hive! Of course, you could dive in headfirst and install a hive in your garden or on your rooftop and become a legit backyard beekeeper. But if you’re not yet up to the challenge of keeping bees and want to do something to keep these amazing creatures safe, you can always “adopt” a hive. Many local beekeepers or national associations, for an annual fee, will allow you to support the work of beekeepers. By doing so, you’ll get honey and other products from your adopted hive, along with information and other fun stuff. You may even have the opportunity to visit your bees!
5. Eat more honey! Support beekeepers—by buying their local and raw honey.
All of Your Beeswax: Royal Jelly, Bee Pollen, Beeswax, and Other Products from the Hive
Beeswax. When bees reach a certain age, they naturally produce wax flakes through a complex digestive process in glands located on the underside of their abdomen. They use the wax to build the hexagonal cells of the beehive (the honeycomb) in which they raise their offspring and store honey. When harvested from a hive, humans can utilize beeswax in lots of cool ways.
Many cosmetic products, such as facial creams, masks, lotions, and lipsticks, use beeswax as an ingredient. (Hi, Burt!) Candles made from beeswax burn cleaner, releasing less carcinogenic soot, and look beautiful. And beeswax is a key ingredient in pharmaceutical and dental products, floor and furniture polish, crayons, candy, chewing gum, ski wax, and tons of other well-known products—helping each to be firm yet pliable, hydrating, softening, protecting, and/or lubricating.
As you’ll see later in the book, beeswax is indispensable around the house. From crafting to home remedies to creating all-natural, greener alternatives to otherwise unnatural products that we use every day, beeswax is fun and easy to work with. When buying beeswax, you may notice that it comes in a variety of colors and forms—yellow, white, block, pellet . . . Color variation has to do with how much the wax has been filtered and/or how much time it spent in the hive. White wax, for example, has had all of its pollen removed, whereas dark yellow wax has hung out in the hive for a good while. You can buy beeswax from a local bee farmer, but it’s also readily available online. Bags of beeswax pellets are great for projects that involve melting the wax; solid bars work best for instances where you’d want to rub the wax on a surface.
Bee pollen. File this under “More Amazing Things Bees Can Do”: In addition to collecting nectar from flowers, honeybees fly from plant to plant gathering sticky pollen in “baskets” on their legs, which they later mix with saliva and nectar and pack into tidy little pellets that are stored in honeycomb cells. These little pollen nuggets become a highly nutritious food source for worker bees and larvae. Some science suggests that bee pollen may be beneficial to humans, because it is rich in amino acids and high in vitamins. Bee pollen is believed to accelerate healing, revitalize the body, and protect cells from free radicals, which is why you’re so likely to see it on the list of add-ins at your local smoothie bar.
Propolis. Also known as “bee glue,” propolis is an incredibly sticky, gummy substance that worker bees gather from trees and plants. It’s basically a cocktail of resin, sap, balm, wax, essential oils, pollen, and minerals that bees use as cement when building the hive. They use it to plug holes, stabilize moveable parts, shellac interior walls, and defend against extreme weather and intruders. Propolis is believed to be rich in many vitamins and other nutrients that make it an antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant. Many people take it as a supplement to relieve joint pain, treat eczema, alleviate gastrointestinal discomfort, and stimulate the immune system.
Royal jelly. Some worker bees called nurse bees produce a creamy, white substance—royal jelly—that they secrete from glands near their head region and feed to newborn bees for the first few days of their life. Sounds like royal jelly is some kind of supercharged baby food, used to get little bees off on the right foot, right? Yes. Except it’s more than that, because royal jelly is also responsible for transforming a common bee into a queen, extending her prolonged existence from six weeks to five years. So, it’s queen food, too.
Worker bees begin the process of “growing” a new queen by filling a special cell in the comb with royal jelly. The larva selected to be the future queen spends her early days literally swimming in the stuff, ultimately transforming her genetic makeup into that of a queen, who will be fed royal jelly for the rest of her life.
The chemical makeup of royal jelly bewilders scientists because of its highly complex compounds, but is known to have antibacterial, antiviral, antibiotic, energizing, nutritive, and antiaging properties. Full of B vitamins and vitamins A, E, and C, enzymes, fatty acids, sterols, gelatin, and immunizing proteins (to defend bees against infection) royal jelly is purported to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels; to improve fertility, relieve menopausal symptoms, and prevent osteoporosis; and to significantly eliminate the free radicals that normally cause premature cell aging. It is often added to cosmetics but may also be taken at home as a supplement, sold at health food stores in capsule, powder, or fresh-frozen form.
Selecting, Buying, and Storing Honey
Thanks to honey’s trendiness, gourmet shops, farmers’ markets, and even our local grocery stores are brimming with fancy flavors and unique varieties of honey. Some are local. Some are raw. Some are foraged from wildflower, clover, buckwheat, orange blossom, or eucalyptus blossoms. There is light, dark, filtered, and unfiltered honey, some with the honeycomb, and some without. There’s honey that is creamed, infused with herbs, and organic, or not. And, believe it or not, a whole lot of honey out there is fake! Yep, counterfeit honey is actually a thing and it involves an estimated 76 percent of honey sold in American supermarkets. And there’s tainted honey, too, which is also a big problem. Much of our mass-produced honey—often imported from China and India—has a history of contamination, which means that, at best, it’s been blended with corn syrup and/or other sweeteners to make it more affordable and, at worst, it’s tainted with lead (from soil that’s been polluted with heavy metals), antibiotics, and other freaky chemicals that you don’t want to know about. Unfortunately, labeling regulations for honey are confusing and get particularly murky when imported honey gets repackaged, then sold somewhere else. In the United States, the FDA is working on it, but for the time being, labeling regulations just aren’t strict or reliable enough to let you know what you’re getting or even where it’s come from.
So . . . suffice it to say, the large selection of honey out there can be overwhelming and the ambiguous labeling can be nerve-racking, so buying it can actually be kind of a confusing undertaking. In an attempt to demystify the whole nine yards and ensure you’re getting the good stuff, here are a few good rules of thumb to keep in mind when shopping for honey.
Choose Local
The best place to shop for honey is locally. That way you know exactly where the honey comes from, and you’ll be sure to get the purest product possible. It’s always best to buy directly from a local beekeeper, but if your closest honey farmer is too far out of reach, seek out farmers’ markets, natural food stores, or a reputable neighborhood grocer who stocks local honey. In other words, try to buy as directly as you can, with as few middlemen or middlewomen as possible.
Buy Raw, Unfiltered Honey
Unless you’re cooking or baking with honey, you should pretty much always be using the raw stuff. Why? Because the process of pasteurizing and/or filtering honey (i.e., heating it) not only destroys many of its natural antioxidants, minerals, and enzymes, it strips and changes the honey’s nuanced flavor. For the best-tasting honey with the densest nutrition profile, opt for honey that has never been heated over natural hive temperatures, which is about 100°F. Unfortunately, since honey labeling is so thorny, you can’t necessarily trust a label, even if it says “100% raw honey.” The best way to guarantee that your honey is actually raw is to shop directly from local sources you can trust and ask them about their product. Chances are, they’ll be very happy to tell you about it.
Don’t Bother Trying to Find Organic Honey
You can skip the organic and GMO-free labels. For honey to be labeled “organic,” according to the USDA, it must come from hives that are free of chemicals or located far away from any present. Also, the flowers that the bees get nectar and pollen from cannot be sprayed with chemicals and the bees cannot be given antibiotics. So, yeah, all the flowers and the entire foraging area need to be pesticide-free. When you consider the fact that a bee can visit as many as 100 flowers and cover a couple of miles in one trip from the hive, you start to understand how tricky it would be to prove that they weren’t exposed to pesticides or antibiotics. Even if the beekeepers are doing their part to keep the hive organic, the foraging area is way too large to control in that way, so “organic” on a label is kind of meaningless.
Shop for Flavor
Enough already with the regulations and the warnings! We’re not talking about buying an insurance policy here! This is honey for goodness’ sake, so first and foremost, you should make sure it tastes delicious. How will you know if it’s delicious? Taste it, silly! More than 300 different kinds of honey are produced in the United States—some floral, some citrusy, some mild, and some complex . . . it all depends on the nectar of the flowers the bees visited. These could include orange blossom, lavender, clover, sunflower, buckwheat, or a mixture of wildflowers, to name but a very few. With all that variety, you’re sure to find something you love.
Tasting honey can get pretty intricate—just as it is for wine, chocolate, and olive oil. Once you get into honey tasting, you might like trying different varietals with a flavor and aroma wheel in hand.
How to Store Honey
This part is pretty straightforward—simply store your honey in a tightly sealed container in a cool place away from direct heat or sunlight. Honey doesn’t need to be refrigerated. In fact, you’ll find it much harder to deal with if you refrigerate it, so just don’t. While honey doesn’t ever “go bad,” you will notice that store-bought honey usually has a best-by date printed on the package. This is simply because, over time, honey can sometimes change color and/or crystallize, especially if it’s raw. If this happens, warm it up briefly with gentle heat (stick the jar in a bowl of hot tap water or zap it in the microwave for a few seconds) and I promise you, it will beehive—I mean behave.
A warning about babies and honey: Since honey is a natural food, you’d think it would be an ideal choice when it comes to feeding babies and it is, but only if they’re over 12 months old. Honey can contain spores of a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum, which is harmless to older kids and adults, but can germinate in a baby’s immature digestive system and cause infant botulism, a rare but potentially fatal illness.
A note for diabetics: Wondering whether honey is a good sugar substitute in a diabetic low-sugar eating plan? In short: not really. Both honey and sugar will impact blood sugar levels. Although honey is sweeter than granulated sugar, and therefore you might use a lot less of it, honey actually has more carbohydrates and more calories per teaspoon than sugar. So, any calories and carbohydrates you save by cutting back will be fairly minimal. In other words, strictly from a carb perspective, there’s no real advantage to using honey instead of sugar.