Honey

Honey is a viscous, supersaturated sugar solution derived from nectar gathered and modified by the honeybee Apis mellifera. Its sweetness comes from high concentrations of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, giving it about the same sweetness as table sugar. Samples discovered in archaeological contexts have proven edible even after millennia because microorganisms cannot grow in it.

Honey is chiefly a concentrated sugar solution, composed of approximately 30 percent glucose, 40 percent fructose, 5 percent sucrose and 20 percent water, alongside amino acids, vitamins and enzymes. Nectar as gathered from flowers generally carries a water content of 70 to 80 percent, whereas finished honey usually holds a water content around 18 percent. Bees reduce the moisture of nectar to about 17 percent so that stored honey does not ferment within the hive, and after ripening in the hive the moisture settles at 15.5-18 percent. The density of honey typically ranges between 1.38 and 1.45 kilograms per litre at 20 degrees Celsius.

The honey bee is a eusocial flying insect of the genus Apis, placed in the largest bee family, Apidae. Eight living species are recognised, divided into 43 subspecies. The best-known of these is the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, domesticated and farmed for honey production and for the pollination of crops. Honey bees build perennial nests in cavities, constructing hexagonal cells from wax they secrete themselves. A colony generally holds one queen, up to a few thousand drones and tens of thousands of female worker bees, about 50,000 bees in all, with numbers peaking near 60,000 in summer.

Successful foragers convey the direction and distance of flowers, water sources and new nest sites to their hive mates through dance. In the waggle dance the direction the bee moves in relation to the hive indicates the direction of the food source, while the duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance to the resource. The waggle dance and the round dance are two forms of dance behaviour that are part of a continuous transition; as the distance between the resource and the hive increases, the round dance transforms into a transitional dance and then the waggle dance.

At the end of the 1920s Karl von Frisch showed that bees finding nectar in a flower fly a special pattern and perform a dance that tells other bees where to find it. In 1973 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries about the organisation and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns.

Beekeeping had its origins in honey hunting, the opportunistic stealing of honey from wild honey bee nests, and true beekeeping began when humans provided artificial cavities in which bees could build comb for the queen to lay eggs and workers to process honey. In the ancient Near East honey was considered an almost magical substance, used as food and to make alcoholic drinks such as mead. There was honey in the alcoholic beverages found in the tomb of King Midas, and honey is the most common ingredient in the ancient medicine of Mesopotamia and Egypt. After he died in Babylon, Alexander the Great was preserved in honey and placed in an enormous golden sarcophagus.

The Cuevas de la Araña are a group of caves at Bicorp in eastern Spain, in the valley of the river Escalona. There a human figure foraging honey is painted, the earliest known depiction of bees and of honey consumption by Homo sapiens, believed to be epaleolithic and estimated at around 8000 years old. The rock art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula is the largest group of rock-art sites in Europe, a World Heritage property including 758 rock-art sites across six autonomous communities of Spain under reference 874. The rock art was discovered in 1920 by a local teacher, Jaume Gari i Poch.

The oldest known honey is honey remains on the inner surface of clay vessels from a tomb in Georgia dating back between 4,700 and 5,500 years, declared by archeologists examining jars unearthed in Georgia to be the world's oldest honey. Honey stains in ceramic vessels found 170 kilometers west of Tbilisi were made by bees that lived 5,500 years ago, some 2,000 years older than the honey from Tutankhamen's tomb. The vessels were found with two human teeth in the tomb of an apparent female noblewoman during pipeline construction.

By 2450 BCE the Egyptians had developed sophisticated apiculture, and within two millennia horizontal-hive beekeeping had spread throughout the Mediterranean. Egyptian hives were horizontal tubes of dried mud stacked on top of each other, a design still used in Azerbaijan and Iran. Even in the Old Kingdom beekeeping was an important activity organized by the Egyptian state. Egyptian temples kept bees to satisfy the desire of the gods for honey and for the production of medicines and ointments.

A bas-relief of the funerary temple of Nyuserre in Abusir, from the Fifth Dynasty around 2500 BCE, shows peasants working around beehives. In one of the oldest tomb paintings, from 2450 BCE, a beekeeper holds something to his face at the opening of the hive, and a beekeeping tomb painting of the same date is known. The Tomb of Rekhmire in Thebes, dating to the 15th century BC, shows beekeepers smoking hives and taking honey. A Saite-period bas-relief in the tomb of the civil officer Pabasa in Thebes shows peasants lifting a beehive.

From around 3100 BC the honeybee was used as a hieroglyph in the topographical symbol of Ancient Egypt, and the pharaonic title nesout-bity, “he who belongs to the sedge and the bee”, symbolised Upper and Lower Egypt from as early as the first dynasty; one of the pharaohs’ titles was Bee King. In Egyptian religion the bee was associated with the goddess Neith of Sais, a creation goddess also linked to hunting and war. Papyri from Ptolemaic Egypt record that hives had to be moved twice a year so that bees could forage where flowers were plentiful.

Honey is a vital constituent in about five hundred Egyptian prescriptions and remedies, used both for its efficacy and as a vehicle, and close to 500 of the roughly 900 prescriptions preserved in the medical papyri include honey as an ingredient. Egyptian healers used it as an anti-cough and antidiarrheal remedy, for wound healing and as an antiseptic, and for toothache. Egyptian wound treatments included closing wounds with sutures and treating infection with honey, and honey, grease and lint were the main components of the most common Egyptian plaster. The Ebers Papyrus was written around 1550 BCE using 328 ingredients to make 876 prescriptions, and according to the medical papyri, among them the Ebers papyrus, honey served as a softener or adjuvant and was also an ingredient in cosmetics.

Mead, also called honey wine, is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey mixed with water. Pottery vessels from northern China dating from at least 7000 BCE contain chemical signatures consistent with honey, rice and fermentation, the earliest evidence of the drink. Historians believe mead was discovered when a bowl of honey left out in the rain fermented naturally. Mead was produced in ancient times throughout Europe, Africa and Asia and held a significance in the mythology of some peoples.

In Norse mythology the Mead of Poetry, crafted from the blood of Kvasir, would turn anyone who drank it into a poet or scholar.

Honey kills Staphylococcus and other bacteria and draws moisture out of wounds, which makes it valuable in the care of burns. A 2015 Cochrane review of honey as a topical treatment for wounds found that honey heals partial thickness burns around 4 to 5 days more quickly than conventional dressings, and reported moderate quality evidence that honey is more effective than antiseptic followed by gauze for wounds infected after surgical operations. Honey was used for wound care in India long before the time of Christ, and separate medical cultures arrived at the same successful therapy. Modern wound care products include growth factors, advanced honey-based dressings and hypochlorous acid cleansers.

Manuka honey is a monofloral honey from the Leptospermum tree in New Zealand and Australia whose antibacterial activity is independent of hydrogen peroxide. Its potency is related to the Unique Manuka Factor rating, which is correlated with methylglyoxal and total phenols. Several studies have quantified methylglyoxal content in manuka honeys and found that it correlates strongly with antibacterial activity, though correlation of the methylglyoxal content of honey with antibacterial activity showed differing relationships for each test organism. Different types of Manuka honey have differing antibacterial effects, and Gram-negative bacteria are more resistant than Gram-positive bacteria. Reported minimum inhibitory concentrations varied between different honey samples and between bacterial species. Honey alters a bacterium's shape and size through septal ring alteration, which affects cell morphology and growth. Manuka honey of different UMF values has medicinal properties and can be beneficial in combination with other antimicrobial agents, and bacterial resistance to honey as an antimicrobial agent has yet to be identified.

The Quran's sixteenth surah, An-Nahl or The Bee, describes how God inspired the bees to make their homes in the mountains, the trees and what people construct. The same surah says that from the bellies of bees comes a liquid of varying colours in which there is healing for people. In the same scriptural tradition, Exodus 3:8 describes God bringing the Israelites up out of Egypt to a good and spacious land flowing with milk and honey. Honey's standing in the ancient Mediterranean world rested on more than symbolism: the ancient Greeks, Romans and Egyptians knew the healing properties of propolis and made extensive use of it as a medicine.

Beeswax served the Egyptian embalmer as a sealing material, often used in mummification to cover the ears, eyes, nose, mouth and the embalming incision. The material also carried a ritual role: beeswax figures of the four sons of Horus accompanied the canopic packages of Dynasty 21 mummies. Honey itself, by contrast, was not always what a vessel promised. Two jars in Tutankhamun's tomb were labeled as containing honey, but none was found in the jars.

Beekeeping did not develop along a single line. In Asia other honey bee species drove its development and spread from around 300 BCE. In Mesoamerica it evolved independently, built around the stingless bee Melipona beecheii.

The archaeological record shows how far back such organized practice reaches. An Iron Age apiary excavated at Tel Rehov in the Jordan River Valley held about 100 ceramic hives. Ancient Israel imported Anatolian honeybees from Turkey, roughly 1,000 kilometers away, because they were gentler and made more honey.

In 2023 world production of honey was 1.9 million tonnes, led by China with 24 percent of the total. Trade in the product is far older: during the European Middle Ages honey and wax became important commodities for trade, and beekeeping in skep, log, box and tree hives flourished.