Buzz about nature’s sweetener
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Hilde G. Lee / Charlottesville Daily Progress
Published: March 12, 2008
I frequently use honey when making a salad dressing. I put three to four tablespoons of balsamic vinegar with one fourth to one third a cup of white or red wine vinegar, three tablespoons of honey, a third of a cup water, and about a third of a cup of olive oil in a glass jar and stir it well. This dressing will keep in the refrigerator for at least a week. The measurements are approximate and you can add more sweetness or tartness, as you desire.
Buzzing around
Bees and honey have been buzzing around for at least 10,000 years. The bee appears in Egyptian hieroglyphs around 4000 B.C. and clay hives became popular about 1,500 years later. Honey was frequently mentioned in the Bible.
Honey was an important ingredient in both the cuisine and culture of classical Greece and Rome. Breads, cakes and sauces were sweetened with it, and it was the base of a wide range of sweet wines. A Roman recipe book ascribed to Apicius includes directions for preserving fruits and meat in honey. The Romans also used honey in various dishes made from nuts, fruits, eggs, fresh cheese and fried bread.
For the Greeks, honey had a religious significance. They offered it in ceremonies to the dead and the gods. The priestesses of the goddesses Demeter, Artemis and Rhea were called "melissai," meaning bees.
Mysterious origins
This exalted status of honey was due, in large part, to its mysterious origins. Aristotle put forth the theory that honey must be dew fallen from the sky because one could not tell what substance the bees gather nor the exact process of their work. At that time people believed that honey was a little bit of heaven fallen to Earth. It was more than 1,000 years before the roles of flowers and bees in the creation of honey were uncovered.
Charlemagne ordered that the larders on his estates always should be kept stocked with bees' wax and honey. Honey continued to the principal sweetener throughout the Middle Ages. All manor houses maintained hives, but they were often destroyed in the frequent wars, causing local shortages of sweets.
In the 16th century some German principalities decreed that all peasants had to keep bees. Another important source of honey was the monasteries. Their prime purpose of keeping bees was for the wax to make liturgical candles with honey being a by-product.
When Henry VIII
abolished the monasteries, England suffered a shortage of honey. Fortunately, this was about the time when cane sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to take the place of honey.
Food historians often claim that America had no bees before Europeans imported them, or that the bees that were here did not make honey.
Neither statement is true. American bees did and do produce honey. When the Spaniards arrived in the New World they found both the Aztecs and the Mayas eating honey from a domesticated bee. Hollow logs were used for hives.
The Pilgrims found it more advantageous to import the more efficient European honeybee - thus giving them both tree sweetener and bee sweetener - maple sugar and honey. At the time it was taken for granted that the bees were of Italian origin. However, they were really Dutch, brought along by the Pilgrims or purchased from the Dutch of New Amsterdam.
Swarming honeybees, eventually escaped into the woods, went wild and eventually progressed across the continent. By 1800 they had crossed the Mississippi and reached Texas by 1821.
Honey may be the only food nature presents to man predigested. The process of converting flower nectar into honey begins immediately when the bee has taken possession of it, on its way back to the hive. The nectar is carried in the honey stomach, where the bee's digestive juices provoke transformations into sugars.
After arriving at the hive the bee discharges its booty into the mouths of the youngest bees, who roll it over their tongues, breathing across it to evaporate some of its water content and concentrate it. Meanwhile their glandular secretions cause further changes in the liquid.
The young bees then transfer the liquid to the storage cells of the honeycomb, where the high temperature inside the hive concentrates it further. When the combs are removed from the hive, they no longer contain nectar. They contain honey, a naturally manufactured product.
Honey carries the distinctive flavors of the flowers from which it is made. Beekeepers, disinclined to trust the choosiness of bees, often move their hives to positions where the bees will visit a certain kind of flower. As the bees are moved, the combs are emptied and new ones are inserted, thus not mixing the type of honey.
Over the years, honey made from thyme has become the world's favorite. Other favorites include orange blossoms, sage and clover. The color of honey is also affected by the nature of the nectar. Thyme honey is clear and golden, while clover produces a pale color and a bland flavor.
Scientists have found that bees have a language in which they communicate with each other - not by word, but by dance. Bees of the same species can "talk" to each other. However, bees of different species communicate with with great difficulty - they apparently dance different dialects.
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