So how is honey made?

Benefits of honey

If you suffer with allergies, especially hay fever, you can benefit from taking honey every day. Bees collect the pollen from the plants and some of this ends up in the honey. As the pollen amount is so small it does not bring on symptoms but instead acts in the same way a vaccination does by building up the bodies own immune defence so that when its hay fever time your body has its own defence ready and you no longer suffer.

Honey has powerful antimicrobial properties making it a good natural medicine. Taking honey for sore throats and colds, with or without the addition of lemon, will bring you welcome relief and it can help to clear your symptoms up quicker. It is also a natural antiseptic and can be used to help heal wounds and ulcers more quickly.

Other fun facts about honey

• Bees are the only insect in the world that make food that people can eat.
• Honey contains all of the substances needed to sustain life, including enzymes, water, minerals and vitamins.
• Eating honey can help you smarter! It is the only food to contain ‘pinocembrin’ that is an antioxidant that improves brain function.
• One bee will only make 1/12 of a teaspoon on honey in its entire life.
• Many plants rely on insects like bees in order to be pollinated; which is why they provide nectar to say thanks.
• A colony of bees can contain between 20,000 and 60,000 bees, but only one queen bee.
• A bee’s wings beat 190 times a second, that’s 11,400 times a minute!
• Worker bees, who are all female, are the only ones who will attack you, and only if they feel threatened.
• It has been estimated that it would take 1,100 bee stings to produce enough venom to be fatal.
• Each colony smells different to bees, this is so they can tell where they live!
• It would take 1,100 bees to make 1kg of honey and they would have to visit 4 million flowers.
• There are 900 cells in a bee’s brain.
• The queen bee will lay around 1,500 eggs a day.
• Bees have two separate stomachs; one for food and another just for nectar.
• Honey has natural preservatives so that it won’t go bad.
• A third of all the plants we eat have been pollinated by bees.
• Bees have been around for more than 30 million years.
• Bees communicate by smells called ‘pheromones’ and by performing special ‘dances’.
• Bee keepers only take the honey that the bees do not need, but this can be as much as 45kg from one hive!
• There are lots of different types of honey which taste different depending on the flowers used to make it.