The B-Day: All about bees & natural honey

The bee and its development from carnivorous solitary wasps is by itself a very remarkable masterpiece of evolution. Equally interesting is the relationship between human and bee. Many may only know honey as the most natural sweetener in the world; the wax in skin creams or as candle; the pollen, the royal jelly or the propolis known as "sweet health supplement".

The bees, as a rather inconspicuous animal, but the flowering plants have only brought to development by preferentially pollinated colored, nectar-secreting parts of plants and thus selectively affect the plant world, which then consisted only of ferns, cypresses and grasses.

The far greater benefits for humanity except that the bees produce such valuable bee products, lies in their pollination performance. Almost the entire fruit production is directly dependent on bee pollination, but also meat, eggs or milk are made possible through the pollination of fodder legumes. In almost all cultures of the earth and in all the writings of the world religions the bee is given a due place, in many the bee is almost sacred.

A land where milk and honey flows, where life is a honey licking, or just where honeycomb became proverbial and the whine is called a queen, indicates how precious the bees and their products have been and will be. And worldwide, of humanity as such.

How is honey made?

Bees, at least the European honeybees, which one finds from humans naturally also on all continents, is called in Latin Apis mellifera (Honigmacherin) and that hits the core.

The bee looks very active and finds (hopefully) sweet plant juices in the nectaries of the flowers and sometimes also the sieve tube juice on leaves and needles. With technical terms we speak of floral and extrafloral nectar sources for the bees.

The extrafloral nectar sources are also called honeydew or honeydew and are produced by Lachnids and Lecania, which, in search of amino acids, excrete the excess of sieve tube juice, which then falls on the leaves and is picked up by the bees in the morning and evening (when it is still humid) becomes.

Happy is the beekeeper (the bees, of course) when the treetops hum. The bees bring the nectar to their family (bees are a community sibling with their mother). 100 mg of nectar includes the charges that are given to other bees at home or are immediately deposited in cells for the bees to take care of. These added ferments and process the honey so that the nectar slowly matures into honey in a few days. The existing sugar is split, water removed, enzymes added until the honey has less than 20% water. Then the honey in the cells is capped and is ripe.

These ripe honeycombs are harvested at some point, naturally made bee-free (here there are very gentle possibilities) and then uncovered and spun with a slingshot by centrifugal force or because of the slight inclination of the cells by the resulting negative pressure.

In this case, no heat or even heat is applied, because the honeycomb anyway already stockwarm and would otherwise gnash by supplying heat. Then you would have to laboriously empty and clean the sling and refill it and you would have lost the reusable empty honeycomb.

It persists stubbornly the opinion of cold-thrown honey would be a criterion for quality honey. But the term is wrong and comes from the time when you pressed honey and literally invites you to cheat. For technical reasons, it is always thrown only cold. In principle, one could cook a honey later and still write on the label "cold thrown", although the honey would have only industrial quality. The hurled honey is then seesei, so goes through its own gravity through different mesh sieves and is cleaned of wax particles and similar impurities. The type of honey production by the bees is no different than it was millions of years ago, the method of honey production by the beekeeper is basically the same for thousands of years. Thus, honey is the most original sweetener on earth.

The legal basis for honey

Valid for honey is the EU honey ordinance, which regulates in exemplary formthe traffic with honey. Honey should not contain any residues (the tolerance here is "zero") of any substances that are not in the honey, according to the EU honey ordinance. It therefore corresponds to a purity requirement.