Some fact you might not know about honey
- Honey never spoils. As long as it is sealed in an airtight container, honey is one of the few foods known to have an “eternal shelf life”.
- Honey has natural preservatives so that it does not spoil.
- Honey has all the ingredients needed to sustain life: water, enzymes, vitamins and mineral.
- One bee will only make 1/12 (8.3%) of a teaspoon of honey in all its lifetime (doesn’t that make you think about all the bees that have ever existed?)
- It would take roughly 1,100 bees to make 1kg of honey and they would have to visit about 4 million flowers.
- Eating honey can make you smarter! It is the only food to contain pinocembrin which is an antioxidant that improves the brain’s functioning.
- Edible honey has been found in several thousand-year-old Egyptian tombs.
- There are lots of different types of honey which also taste differently, mostly depending on the flowers used to make them.
- Honey has different colours.
- A beehive can produce as much as 30 to 100 pounds of honey a year.
- In Medieval Europe, honey was a hot item.
- Bees are the only insects in the world that make food
- During winter, bees survive on honey. They practically have to work all summer to ensure that during winter, they have enough honey for the hive to survive.
- Honey makes for a perfect high energy diet.
- Honey is medicinal. As far back as ancient Mesopotamia, honey was used for treating wounds. It was often used as a natural bandage to protect cuts and burns from infection.
- Honey is used as a natural treatment for stomach ulcers, seasonal allergies and dandruff.
- Although we have been made to believe that all bees make honey, there are practically over 20,000 species of bees and only a small fraction of them make honey.
- Apart from bees, the Mexican honey wasp is also produces honey on a large scale. The Pre-European Native Americans knew this fact and took advantage of it, but this particular honey could be poisonous because to the flowers the wasps visited.
- Honey is very good for the environment and the economy too (Nigerians should capitalize on this).
The most intriguing fact
A colony of bees which, can contain between 20,000 to 60,000 bees, there is only one Queen Bee. She is usually the mother of most, if not all, the bees in a beehive.
