Honey Facts

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Facts courtesy of the Golden Blossom Honey web site.  Just click on the categories listed below to be taken to the facts from that category. Or, scroll down and browse through the entire collection.

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About Honey

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Honey throughout History and Around the World

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About Honeybees

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About The Work of the Honeybee

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Honey and Your Health

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Honey Lingo

Amazing Facts...About Honey

1. Honey never spoils. No need to refrigerate it. It can be stored unopened, indefinitely, at room temperature in a dry cupboard.
2. Honey is one of the oldest foods in existence. It was found in the tomb of King Tut and was still edible since honey never spoils.
3. Due to the high level of fructose, honey is 25% sweeter than table sugar.
4. Honey is created when bees mix plant nectar, a sweet substance secreted by flowers, with their own bee enzymes.
5. To make honey, bees drop the collected nectar into the honeycomb and then evaporate it by fanning their wings.
6. Honey has different flavors and colors, depending on the location and kinds of flowers the bees visit. Climatic conditions of the area also influence its flavor and color.
7. To keep their hives strong, beekeepers must place them in locations that will provide abundant nectar sources as well as water.
8. In the days before biology and botany were understood, people thought it was a special kind of magic that turned flower nectar into honey.
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Amazing Facts...Honey throughout History and Around the World
1. Honey has been delighting humans for more then 40 centuries. In ancient Egypt, taxes were paid with it, while in early Greece and Rome honey symbolized fertility, love, and beauty.
2. In the Bible, this sublime nectar is dubbed "the heavenly food."
3. To the ancients, honey was a source of health, a sign of purity and a symbol of strength and virility.
4. Early man considered bees mysterious and magical creatures because their amazing organized labor produced honey - a "nectar for the gods".
5. In Greek mythology, it is said that cupid dipped his arrows in honey to fill the lovers heart with sweetness.
6. In biblical days, John the Baptist lived on a diet of wild locust and honey.
7. In 50 BC, the Romans painted pictures with melted dyed beeswax.
8. The earliest illustration we have of honey being gathered is around 15,000 years old and appears in a painting on the walls of a rock shelter in eastern Spain.
9. In the early centuries B.C., the Ancient Greeks made little honey cakes from flour, honey and oil, sometimes baked with fresh flowers inside them, as supplications to their gods. They considered honey to be an important food as well as a healing medicine.
10. The ancient Greeks minted coins with bees on them.
11. Democritus (460-370 BC), Greek philosopher and physician, chose a diet rich in honey and lived until he was 109 years old.
12. In the first century A.D., Apicus, a wealthy Roman gourmet, wrote a series of books in which more than half the recipes included honey.
13. Physicians in ancient Rome used honey to help their patients fall asleep.
14. Honey was the most used medicine in ancient Egypt. Of the more than 900 medical remedies we know about for that time, more than 500 were honey based.
15. The Egyptians kept their bees in tall, cylindrical hives; similar hives are still used in remote parts of Egypt today.
16. The beer that the first Anglo-Saxons drank was a brew of water and honeycomb in a clay pot, with the addition of herbs for flavoring.
17. For thousands of years, honey and fruits were the only sweeteners in Europe.
18. Napoleon used the bee as a symbol of his empire after his coronation in 1804. It stood for industry, efficiency and productivity. Also emblematic of immortality and resurrection, the bee was chosen to link the new dynasty to the very origins of France. Golden bees (cicadas really) were discovered in 1653 in Tournai in the tomb of Childeric I (father of Clovis) who founded the Merovingian dynasty in 457. They were considered to be the oldest emblem of the sovereigns of France.
19. The colonists first brought honeybees to North America, but in Central America, the indigenous peoples had long kept bees.
20. In Nice, France, Christmas is celebrated with nougat blanc, a candy made of honey, almond and egg white. Spring, in Poland, is greeted with glasses of honey wine and the Jewish New Year is welcomed with honey cake or apples dipped in honey, to insure a sweet life in the year ahead.
21. In 1984, honeybees constructed a honeycomb in zero gravity as part of an experiment on a space shuttle.
22. In 1984, a backstage worker at the Paris opera established one of the most unusually sited beehives on the roof of the opera house. The "opera bees" gather their nectar as they visit flowers all over the city of Paris. The fruits of their labors are on sale in the souvenir shop of the opera.
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Amazing Facts...About Honeybees
1. Honeybees are one of science's great mysteries because they have remained unchanged for 20 million years, even though the world changed around them.
2. Bees have been producing honey for at least 150 million years.
3. The true honeybee was not known in the Americas until Spanish, Dutch, and English settlers introduced it near the end of the 17th century.
4. Did you know that bees have 4 wings?
5. The honeybee's wings stroke 11,400 times per minute, thus making their distinctive buzz.
6. A bee flies at a rate of about 12 miles per hour.
7. How many eyes does a honeybee have? Five.
8. Honeybees communicate with one another by "dancing".
9. The queen bee is the busiest in the summer months, when the hive needs to be at its maximum strength. She will lay about 1,000 to 1,500 eggs per day.
10. In the cold winter months, bees will leave the hive only to take a short cleansing flight. They are fastidious about the cleanliness of their hive.
11. Honeybees do not die out over the winter. They feed on the honey they collected during the warmer months and patiently wait for spring. They form a tight cluster in their hive to keep the queen and themselves warm.
12. It takes 35 pounds of honey to provide enough energy for a small colony of bees to survive the winter.
13. Honeybee colonies have unique odors that members flash like identification cards at the hive's front door. All the individual bees in a colony smell enough alike so that the guard bees can identify them.
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Amazing Facts...About The Work of the Honeybee
1. The honeybee is not born knowing how to make honey; the younger bees are taught by the more experienced ones.
2. Some worker bees are nurse bees. Their job is to feed the larvae.
3. A honeybee visits between 50 and 100 flowers during one collection flight from the hive.
4. In order to produce 1 pound of honey, 2 million flowers must be visited.
5. A hive of bees must fly 55,000 miles to produce a pound of honey.
6. One bee colony can produce 60 to 100 pounds of honey per year.
7. An average worker bee makes only about 1/12 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.
8. At the peak of the honey-gathering season, a strong, healthy hive will have a population of approximately 50,000 bees.
9. It would take approximately 1 ounce of honey to fuel a bee's flight around the world.
10. A Cornell University paper released in 2000 concluded that the direct value of honeybee pollination to U.S. agriculture is $14.6 billion annually.
11. We should appreciate honeybees for their honey and pollination services. 80% of the pollination of the fruits, vegetables and seed crops in the U.S. is accomplished by honeybees.
12. Honey is the primary food source for the bee. 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. The nectar is converted to honey by the honeybee and stored in the wax honeycomb.
13. The United States has an estimated 211,600 beekeepers.
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Amazing Facts...About Honey and Your Health
1. Honey contains vitamins and antioxidants, but is fat free, cholesterol free and sodium free!
2. Not a spinach lover? Eat honey - it has similar levels of heart-healthy antioxidants!
3. One antioxidant called "pinocembrin" is only found in honey.
4. For years, opera singers have used honey to boost their energy and soothe their throats before performances.
5. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
6. Honey has the ability to attract and absorb moisture, which makes it remarkably soothing for minor burns and helps to prevent scarring.
7. Honey speeds the healing of open wounds and also combats infection.
8. As recently as the First World War, honey was being mixed with cod liver oil to dress wounds on the battlefield.
9. Modern science now acknowledges honey as an anti-microbial agent, which means it deters the growth of certain types of bacteria, yeast and molds.
10. Honey and beeswax form the basics of many skin creams, lipsticks, and hand lotions.
11. Queen Anne of England, in the early 1700's, invented a honey and olive oil preparation to keep her hair healthy and lustrous.
12. According to Dr. Paul Gold, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, "people remember things much better after they've consumed glucose, a form of sugar found in honey."
13. Honey is nature's energy booster! It provides a concentrated energy source that helps prevent fatigue and can boost athletic performance.
14. Recent studies have proven that athletes who took some honey before and after competing recovered more quickly than those who did not.
15. Honey supplies 2 stages of energy. The glucose in honey is absorbed by the body quickly and gives an immediate energy boost. The fructose is absorbed more slowly providing sustained energy.
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Amazing Facts...Honey Lingo
1. The term "making a beeline for", describes the shortest and quickest route the nectar-gathering bee follows to return to the hive.
2. A beekeeper is called an "apiarist".
3. An apiary is a location where beekeepers set out a group of beehives. They are commonly referred to as a "bee yard".
4. While bee "skeps" (old-style beehive shaped structures) are not in widespread use today, their charm continues to be associated with beekeeping. The modern rectangular beehive is merely a more convenient adaptation to the honeybees' behavior.
5. Utah is known as the "beehive state".
6. The word "honeymoon" carries the significance that the first month of marriage is the sweetest.
7. In the 15th century, honey was known as "the soul of flowers".
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