Honey

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Honey (disambiguation).

Jars of honey and honeycomb

Honey in honeycombs

Traditional honey pot from North Korea

Honey (English pronunciation: /ˈhʌni/) is a sweet food made by honey bees using nectar from flowers. The variety produced byhoney bees (the genus Apis) is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepersand consumed by humans. Honey produced by other beesand insects has distinctly different properties.

Honey bees form nectar into honey by a process ofregurgitation and store it as a food source in wax honeycombsinside the beehive. Beekeeping practices encourage overproduction of honey so that the excess can be taken without endangering the bee colony.

Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructoseand glucose and has approximately the same relativesweetness as that of granulated sugar (74% of the sweetness of sucrose, a disaccharide).^[1][2] It has attractive chemical properties for baking, and a distinctive flavor which leads some people to prefer it over sugar and other sweeteners.^[1] Mostmicro-organisms do not grow in honey because of its lowwater activity of 0.6.^[3] However, honey sometimes contains dormant endospores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which can be dangerous to infants as the endospores can transform into toxin-producing bacteria in the infant's immature intestinal tract, leading to illness and even death^[4] (see Health hazards below).

Honey has a long history of human consumption and is used in various foods and beverages as a sweetener and flavoring. It also has a role in religion and symbolism. Flavors of honey vary based on the nectar source, and various types and grades of honey are available. It is also used in various medicinal traditions to treat ailments. The study of pollens and spores in raw honey (melissopalynology) can determine floral sources of honey.^[5] Because bees carry an electrostatic charge, and can attract other particles, the same techniques of melissopalynology can be used in area environmental studies of radioactive particles, dust, or particulate pollution.^[6][7]

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