Hello Honey, What Are You Doing ?

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Good evening, pals!

I'm back with something sweet to discuss. Tonight, it's all about HONEY!

Sweet, golden brown, thick, natural, and from bees. Those are common things we know about honey.

Anything else? Come on, talk about honey together!

Honey is the substance made when the nectar and sweet deposits from plants are gathered, modified and stored in the honeycomb by honey bees. Main contents in honey are glucose, fructose, and water. There are many types of honey based on flower sources, such as Manuka honey, Pasture honey, Jelly Bush honey, Jungle honey, Chestnut honey, Rhododendron honey, and Blossom honey.

Honey has characteristics that are sensitive to heat, which may loss its bio-activity; sensitive to light; storage effect due to heat and light exposure.

Honey bees, which produce honey, are the only insects that produce a food consumed by humans. Honey is produces in a beehive. Honey bees colony contains one queen, 500-1000 drones, and about 30.000-60.000 workers. The queen, which is nurtured on a special diet of royal jelly, is the only sexually developed female in the hive. The drone bees will mate the queen to give more bee eggs. Once giving eggs, the queen may produce about 3.000 eggs to hatch. After the eggs are hatched, the worker bees will do a sequence of jobs, like cleaning the nursery, caring for and feeding the larvae, collecting nectar, making wax comb, and guarding the hive.

While bees are collecting nectar from blossom to blossom to produce honey, they also spread pollens from plant to plant. So that those plants would fertilize and be able to bear fruits.

Talking about nutrients contained in Honey,

Honey is mainly about carbohydrates, the most are fructose (38,5%) and glucose (31%). The remaining carbohydrates are maltose, sucrose. Honey's water content is about 17,1%.

Honey also contains vitamins, such as pyridoxin, thiamine, niacin, riboflavin, and pantothenic acid; minerals, such as Ca, Co, Fe, Mg, Mn, P, K, Na, and Zn. Moreover, honey has a good components of antioxidants, they are chrysin, pinobanksin, vitamin C, catalase, and pinocembrin.

Honey is nice when you know whether it can inhibit pathogenic bacteria in our body (example is when we have an open injured). How come?

I'm trying to be simple at this. Honey has a great amount of sugar. When honey is diluted with water, it will activate the glucose oxidaze enzyme, which will hydrolyze sugar to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). This H2O2 will inhibit the growth of pathogenic microbes. Besides, honey itself is viscous, thus can protect the open injured (wounds) from infections. Also, honey has low pH amongst 3.2 - 4.5 that is the pH level where bacteria can't grow well. According to research done, honey is effective against Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Streptococcus aureus.  How cool that is!

References : 

Anonim. 1986. The Story of Honey. Longmont : The National Honey Board.

 Mandal, Manisha Deb and Shyamapada Mandal. 2011. "Honey : Its Medicinal Property and Antibacterial Activity". Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine, vol. 1 (2) : 154 - 160.

Singh, M. P. et al. 2012. "Honey as Complementary Medicine : A Review". International Journal of Pharma and Bio Sciences, vol. 3 (2) : 12 - 31.