Did you know ...

Bees have been producing honey for at least 150 million years.

 

Honey is one of the oldest foods in existence.

 

Honey is the only food that includes all substances necessary to sustain life.

 

Honey never spoils because it is naturally anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial, anti-everything nasty.

 

Honey

• Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and water; and it is the only food that contains pinocembrin a powerful antioxidant which improves brain functioning.
• Honey is one of the oldest foods in existence. It was found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun and was still edible since honey never spoils because it is naturally anti microbial, anti fungal, anti bacterial, anti everything nasty which is why it's also such an incredible healer.
• Raw honey is a natural source of vitamin B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, and even antioxidant-rich vitamin C. It also contains minerals like magnesium, potassium, calcium, sodium chlorine, sulphur, and phosphate and just tastes sublime.
• Honey never spoils. No need to refrigerate it. It can be stored unopened, indefinitely, at room temperature in a dry cupboard.
• Due to the high level of fructose, honey is 25% sweeter than table sugar.
• Raw honey means all the natural vitamins and living enzymes and other nutritional elements are preserved.
• Raw honey is unheated and unpasteurised.
• Raw honey is the most original sweet liquid that honeybees produce from the concentrated nectar of flowers.
• Raw honey is an alkaline-forming food and contains ingredients similar to those found in fruits, which become alkaline in the digestive system.
• Honey has exceptional nutritional value and its amylase, an enzyme concentrated in flower pollen helps predigest starchy foods like bread.
• Real raw honey crystallises which means your honey is pure, raw and natural!
• Crystallisation and de-mixing of honey means your honey is pure, raw and natural!
• The crystallisation process is natural and spontaneous. Pure, raw and unheated honey has a natural tendency to crystallise over time with no effect to the honey other than colour and texture.
• The crystallisation of honey actually preserves the flavour and quality characteristics of your honey.
• The crystallisation of honey is an attribute of pure and natural honey.
• Some honeys crystallise uniformly; some will be partially crystallised and form two layers, with the crystallised layer on the bottom of the jar and a liquid on top.
• Honey contains about 400 substances and compounds, which are vital to man for the full activity of the organism.
• Honey has different flavours and colours, depending on the location and kinds of flowers the bees visit. Climatic conditions of the area also influence its flavour and colour. For example, Hexapi German Organic Rape Honey is nearly white while our Organic Silver Fir Honeydew is liquid and very dark.

 

Honey & Health

• In Ayurvedic medicine, honey is known as 'Yogavahi', which means "carrier of the healing values of the herbs to the cells and tissues".
• Honey speeds the healing of open wounds and also combats infection.
• Modern science now acknowledges honey as an anti-microbial agent, which means it deters the growth of certain types of bacteria, yeast and moulds.
• Bees are changing medicine. To reinforce their hives, bees use a resin from poplar and evergreen trees called propolis. It’s basically beehive glue which fights off bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Research shows that propolis may relieve cold sores, canker sores, herpes, sore throat, cavities, and even eczema.
• Bee stings may also ease pain caused by rheumatoid arthritis. Researchers found that molecules in bee venom increase your body’s level of glucocorticoid, an anti-inflammatory hormone.
• Honey speeds up the healing process of wounds and burns. It speeds up the healing process by closing and sterilising wounds therefore preventing the growth of bacteria and is used in hospitals for treating deep wounds, burns or ulcers.
• Micro-organisms do not grow in honey.
• Have you ever had an unrelenting sore throat? Honey has proven to be a natural throat soother! Gargle with honey to soothe a sore throat and prevent coughing attacks.
• One glass of warm water taken with two teaspoons of honey and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice in the early morning reduces fat and purifies blood.
• Raw honey is a natural sweetener with the benefits of all those antioxidants and antimicrobial properties that are not present in table sugar.
• Honey has a calming effect ‐ for insomniacs try a tablespoon before going to bed for a good night’s sleep.
• Honey is one of the oldest foods in existence. It was found in the tomb of King Tutankhamun and was still edible since honey never spoils because it is naturally anti microbial, anti fungal, anti bacterial, anti everything nasty which is why it's also such an incredible healer.

 

Honey & Humans

• Bees are the only insects that produces food eaten by man.
• Primitive man learnt to gather honey by “robbing the bees” about 10 000 years ago.
• The oldest cave painting depicting the "Man of Bicorp" robbing honey out of the hive was found in the Cave of the Spider in Valencia, Spain.
• The first known beekeepers were the Egyptians in 2.400 BC. Egyptians valued honey so greatly that they offered it to the gods and people of great status. They used it to embalm the dead and used honey as a currency and taxes.
• Egyptian medicinal compounds used honey more than five millennia ago and honey was used topically to treat wounds.
• Over four thousand years ago, honey was used as a traditional Ayurvedic medicine, where it was thought to be effective at treating material imbalances in the body.
• The Ancient Greeks offered honey to the spirits of the dead as a tribute to their gods whose staple diet was honey.
• The Greeks believed that Zeus was fed nectar from the bees during his upbringing.
• The ancient Greeks believed that consuming honey could help you live longer.
• Romans developed the art of beekeeping into a major rural industry throughout their Empire.
• The Bible refers to the area encompassing Israel and Palestine as the land of milk and honey.
• “My son, eat thou honey, for it is good” — King Solomon – Proverbs: 24:13
• German peasants were required to give their feudal lords a payment of honey and beeswax.
• The Americas didn't have honey bees until they were introduced by Spanish, Dutch, and English settlers near the end of the 17th century.
• The Native Americans referred to the honeybee as the "White Man's Flies," because wild swarms always preceded the arrival of the white man.
• As recently as the First World War, honey was being mixed with cod liver oil to dress wounds on the battlefield.

 

蜂蜜酒

• It was old custom in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the honey wine he could drink and because their calendar was lunar this period was called the honey month - known today as the honeymoon.

 

Honey & Bees

• Bees have been producing honey for at least 150 million years.
• Honey bee colonies evolved to survive during winter when there is little to eat outside and since bees don’t fly when the temperature drops below 13°C/55°F. 
• Honey is created when bees by mixing plant nectar, a sweet substance secreted by flowers, with their own enzymes.
• To make honey, bees drop the collected nectar into the honeycomb and then evaporate the water by fanning their wings.
• Honey is the primary food source for the bee.
• The nectar is converted to honey by the honeybee and stored in the wax honeycomb.
• The reason honeybees are so busy collecting nectar from flowers and blossoms is to make sufficient food stores for their colony over the winter months.
• An average worker bee makes only about ½ to 1 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
• In order to produce 1 kg of honey, about 4 million flowers must be visited.
• A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 4 jars of Hexapi Honey.
• One bee colony can produce up to 150 kg of honey per year.
• In the days before biology and botany were understood, people thought it was a special kind of magic that turned flower nectar into honey.
• Honey producing is hard work: a bee makes just a 12th of a teaspoon in its lifetime, a 250 g jar comes from the nectar of one million flowers.
• The worker bees are in charge of preparing the honey and as many as 10 000 flowers a day may be visited by a bee.
• Honey involves a partial or complete inversion of sucrose. This conversion process takes place in the worker bee’s stomach which is called the honey-sac. Nectar sucrose with the addition of the enzyme invertase is converted to dextrose (grape sugar) and levulose (fruit sugar). The completion of this conversion takes place in the cells of the honeycomb where it is ripened under a sealed cap.
• Bees have to visit 2 million flower blossoms to create 1 pound of honey, and then must consume 6 pounds of honey to generate 1 pound of beeswax to build honeycombs.

 

Bees & Environment

• A honeybee visits between 50 and 100 flowers during one collection flight from the hive.
• Appreciate honeybees for their honey and pollination services. At least 80% of the pollination of the fruits, vegetables and seed crops is accomplished by honeybees.
• The direct value of honeybee pollination to U.S. agriculture alone is estimated to be $14.6 billion annually.
• Bees work harder than you. During chillier seasons, worker bees can live for nine months. But in the summer, they rarely last longer than six weeks, they literally work themselves to death.

 

Bees & Water

• Bees need a reliable source of clean water even though their major source of water comes from nectar. In hot summers a bee colony may need several litres of water per day which they collect from puddles, rivers, lakes, or water troughs which are close to the their hive.
• Every colony has worker bees whose main task is collecting water and if necessary foraging worker bees will quit forage and help with water collection. Each water collecting bee usually makes about 50 daily trips, each time collecting about 25 mg of water. 
• Bees keep the humidity and temperature in the beehive at an optimal level of 35°C. In hot summers however, temperatures inside the hive would go higher, endangering the colony or even melting the honey combs, if bees would not use evaporative cooling by spreading a thin film of water on top of sealed brood cells or on the rims of cells with larvae or eggs. Worker bees flap their wings quickly and create an airflow inside the hive which evaporates the water and cools the interior of the hive.
• Bees also need water to digest and metabolise their food properly. The food for developing bee larvae contains around 70% water and is secreted by hypopharyngeal glands of worker bees using honey, pollen and water.
• Adult bees also need water as they eat honey. Raw organic untreated honey that bees store in their honeycomb crystallises naturally after some time due to its glucose content. Because of this concentration of glucose, bees need water to dilute the honey.

 

Bee Biology

• There are about 25,000 or so species of bees that have evolved to pollinate flowering plants. To put that in perspective, there are around 10,000 species of birds, and around 5,400 different mammals.
• Only 1 per cent of bee species worldwide are boldly striped with dense fur and only few bee species make honey and live together with a queen, workers and male drones.
• The world’s largest bee is the Megachile pluto. It is 4 cm long with a enormous wingspan of 6.3 cm and has jaws like a stag beetle. It was thought to be extinct until its was rediscovered in 2019 on an Indonesian island, nesting inside an active termite mound. The smallest bee is less than 2 mm long and are members of the Euryglossina (Quasihesma) group native to Australia.
• Honeybees are scientifically known as Apis mellifera, which mean "honey-carrying bee".
• Honeybees are one of science's great mysteries because they have remained unchanged for 20 million years, even though the world changed around them.
• Bees have 4 wings. The honey bee's wings stroke incredibly fast, about 200 beats per second, thus making their famous, distinctive buzz. A honey bee can fly for up to six miles, and as fast as 15 miles per hour.
• It would take approximately 1 ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world.
• Honeybees have five eyes, 2 compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses (one on each side of the head), 3 simple eyes on the top of the head
• Honeybees have 6 legs, 2 pairs of wings, a nectar pouch, and a stomach.
• Bees “dance” to communicate to give fellow bees directions to good food.
• Honeybees have 170 odorant receptors, compared with only 62 in fruit flies and 79 in mosquitoes. Their exceptional olfactory abilities include kin recognition signals, social communication within the hive, and odour recognition for finding food. Their sense of smell is so precise that it could differentiate hundreds of different floral varieties and tell whether a flower carried pollen or nectar from metres away.
• Bees have personalities. Researchers found that not all bees are interchangeable drones. Some bees are thrill-seekers. Others are a bit more timid. A 2011 study even found that agitated honeybees can be pessimistic, showing that, to some extent, bees might have feelings.
• Bees use the sun as a compass. But when it’s cloudy they navigate by polarised light, using special photo receptors to find the sun's place in the sky. The Vikings may have used a similar system – sun stones of calcite acted like a polaroid filter and helped them stay on course.
• The bee's brain is oval in shape and only about the size of a sesame seed, yet it has remarkable capacity to learn and remember things and is able to make complex calculations on distance travelled and foraging efficiency.
• Bees can solve hairy mathematical problems. Pretend you have to visit six stores and they’re all at six separate locations. What’s the shortest distance you can travel while visiting all six? Mathematicians call this the “travelling salesman problem,” and it can even stump some computers. But for bees, it’s a snap. Researchers found that bumblebees fly the shortest route possible between flowers. So far, they’re the only animals known to solve the problem.
• When ageing bees do jobs usually reserved for younger members, their brain stops ageing. In fact, their brain ages in reverse.
• When bees change jobs, they change their brain chemistry. Bees are hardwired to do certain jobs. Scout bees, which search for new sources of food, are wired for adventure. Soldier bees work as security guards their whole life. One percent of all middle-aged bees become undertakers—a genetic brain pattern compels them to remove dead bees from the hive. But most amazingly, regular honeybees, which perform multiple jobs in their lifetime will change their brain chemistry before taking up a new function.
• Worker honey bees are female, live for about 6 weeks and do all the work.
• Nurse bees work inside the hive. Their job is to make royal jelly, feed and clean the larvae, queen and drones.
• House bees clean away the dead, make wax and comb, heat or cool the hive, receive nectar and make honey, put it into the comb and sealing it with wax.
• Male drones are larger than the worker bees, have no stinger and do no work at all. All they do is mating. Before winter or when food becomes scarce, female honeybees usually force surviving males out of the nest.
• Only worker bees sting, and only if they feel threatened and they die once they sting. Queens have a stinger, but they don't leave the hive to help defend it. It is estimated that 1100 honey bee stings are required to be fatal.
• The queen bee can live up to 5 years and her role is to fill the hive with eggs. She is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength, she lays up to 2,500 eggs per day, without sleeping.
• The queen has control over whether she lays male or female eggs. If she uses stored sperm to fertilise the egg, the larva that hatches is female. If the egg is left unfertilised, the larva that hatches is male. In other words, female bees inherit genes from their mothers and their fathers while male bees inherit only genes from their mothers.

 

Bees & Hive

• To keep their bee hives strong, our family beekeepers must place them in locations that will provide abundant nectar sources as well as water.
• It takes 16 kg of honey to provide enough energy for a small colony of bees to survive the winter.
• Honeybee colonies have unique odours. All the individual bees in a colony smell alike so that the guard bees can identify them.
• Beeswax is made from tiny glands on the worker bees’ abdomen and melts at 62 -65 degrees C.
• A colony of bees consists of 20,000-60,000 honeybees and one queen.
• At the peak of the honey-gathering season, a strong, healthy hive will have a population of approximately 50,000 bees.
• Honeybees do not die out over the winter, but reduce numbers by throwing out the old, the weak and drones. They feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months and patiently wait for spring by forming a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
• Bees collect pollen near their hive, but far enough that predators can’t find the hive.
• They’re nature’s most economical builders. In 36 BC, Marcus Terentius Varro argued that honeycombs were the most practical structures around. Centuries later, Greek mathematician Pappus solidified the “honeycomb conjecture” by making the same claim. Almost 2000 years later, Thomas Hales wrote a 19-page mathematical proof showing that, of all the possible structures, honeycombs use the least amount of wax. And not only are honeycombs the most efficient structures in nature and the walls meet at a precise 120-degree angle, a perfect hexagon.

 

"Unique among all God's creatures, only the honeybee improves the environment and preys not on any other species." Royden Brown

"If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live." Albert Einstein