Healers, priests, hedge witches, shamans, apothecaries and your nan have known since
a caveman first shoved his hand into a beehive that bee stings hurt, but now it’s official.
Yes that, and honey is good for you.
A recent Meta-study by Oxford academics found that honey is better for treating coughs and
colds - upper respiratory tract infections - than antibiotics.
And according to a slightly less insightful study it turns out , bee stings are indeed
painful; the most painful place to be stung by a bee is on your penis – presuming you
have one.
I very much doubt that any woman would have the balls – or shall we call it curiosity?
- to give it a go.
When scientists aren’t throwing bee hives at naked people to see what happens they’re
usually seeking approval for some new ‘miracle’ cure.
And, in 2018, Public Health England recommended that honey should be prescribed before antibiotics
for coughs and colds.
Previous to that in 2007 the FDA approved Medihoney, a honey-based gel used for wound
treatment.
But certain truths are self-evident, and just as most people know it’s a bad idea to get
stung on your private parts, humans have known about the medicinal properties of honey for
as long as we’ve being sticking our fingers and other curious parts into holes Thousands
of years of honey wisdom has been gleaned through the trial and error process known
as history – or as I like to call it ‘let’s see what happens if we rub this on our nipples’.
And what did our ancestors discover?
That honey is magic.
In a world with no antibiotics it was often the most effective and only cure for any number
of ills.
And therefore it was highly prized, and sometimes worshipped.
We have records from the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, recipes for salves and other
remedies, many of which are based on or use honey.
Ayurvedic medicine, an ancient Indian form of healing, uses it to aid everything, from
vomiting to obesity, stress, jaundice, stomach ulcers and much more.
It was often left in tombs for the dead to take with them to the afterlife, showing how
highly it was valued.
There’s even a fifteen thousand year old cave painting in Spain of a man climbing a
tree and harvesting honey from a beehive.
No penises were depicted – or, one hopes, harmed - in this endeavour.
The Greeks went even further and worshipped it as the nectar of the Gods.
Well, the Greek Gods were always a bit weird.
Cleopatra is reputed to have bathed in honey.
Some cultures even mellified their dead, which is the practise of steeping the dead in honey
to preserve them.
A 16th century Chinese doctor wrote that the Arabic people took it one step further.
In a unique twist on old age social care, elderly Arabic men sacrificed themselves for
their descendants.
As they neared the end of their life they supposedly gave up food and drink, only consumed
honey – and bathed in it.
Then, when death finally came, they were mellified in stone coffins.
A hundred years later they were exhumed, their bodies having decomposed and mixed with the
honey.
This corpse-infused honey was then used to heal wounds, fractures and limbs, with only
a small amount taken internally for the cure.
So, that’s alright then.
Not disturbing in the slightest.
What is disturbing is the story – though perhaps a legend – of an archaeologist who
unearthed two sealed earthenware jars full of Pre-Hellenistic honey at a dig in northern
Israel.
He tasted the honey, which was apparently quite good.
But then, as he dug a little deeper, what he discovered made him rather regret his ancient
amuse bouche – in the bottom of the jar, were the bones of an infant child.
Sweet.
That’s rather vomit-inducing if you ask me.
Do you know what else is vomit-induced?
Honey.
That’s right, honey is little more than vomit.
Bee vomit.
The honey making process starts with scavenger bees collecting nectar and pollen from flowers,
then transporting it back to the hive as they start to digest it.
Here they regurgitate it, passing it on to worker bees who repeatedly consume, semi-digest
and vomit it up again and again and again, until finally, somehow, they sense it’s
ready.
That or they’re just sick of the whole process.
Finally, they fan it with their wings to evaporate the last of the water, and then top it with
a layer of beeswax to seal it into the honeycomb for a nice tasty treat in the winter months.
Unless, of course, a wandering beekeeper, scientist, caveman or penis pops by to steal
it.
It’s a bizarre and convoluted procedure involving complicated chemical processes – but
put simply, honey is the combined vomit of many different bees.
In the past stealing honey usually meant killing the bees and destroying their home – that
was until 1814, when Ukranaian Petro Prokopovych invented the first prototype for a wooden
hive frame and ever since we’ve been able to humanely farm honey without causing too
much disruption.
But it is this mysterious process, powered by the enzymes in bees’ stomachs that semi-digest
the nectar, which grants honey its unique qualities.
By repeatedly digesting it, and drying it, over and over, the bees create a supersaturated
solution that contains more dissolved material than the solvent - in this case the water
- can dissolve.
As a result, honey is not only anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and antibacterial but also has
a variety of other health benefits.
It’s rich in antioxidants, which are thought to ward off heart attacks, strokes and even
some types of cancer.
It may improve cholesterol levels, it reputedly reduces ulcers and gastrointestinal disorders,
and can heal wounds and burns.
It’s even slightly anti-viral and has proved effective when applied to cold sores, which
are caused by the Herpes virus.
Honey can impede the growth of E.coli, salmonella and MRSA, the famous antibiotic-resistant
hospital bug.
One of the reasons honey is so hard to understand is that there are many different types, with
a variety of properties and effects, all dependent on the type of nectar and pollen used to produce
the honey.
Honey can be made from a single flower – unifloral – or a combination of many different flowers
– you guessed it, mutifloral.
It can be raw, straight from the beehive, or pasteurized, heated and strained to eliminate
bacterial or fungal contamination.
Some types of honey are toxic and can kill you; some can make you fly – or at least
make you think you can fly.
It all depends where the bees get their pollen.
You can have lavender, rosemary, buckwheat and clover honey, though the most common honey
is a mix of many pollen.
As a rule of thumb, dark honey is generally higher in antibacterial and antioxidant properties
than the lighter variety.
One of them, Manuka is one of the most prized in the world.
It’s made in New Zealand and top quality Manuka can sell for six pounds per gram.
But the prize for most expensive honey goes to Elvish honey, supremely rare and found
in a deep Turkish cave, it goes for forty-one pounds per gram.
It’s reputed to have extraordinary health benefits due to the rich mineral content in
the cave and the medicinal plants in the surrounding area.
And the stuff that can make you fly?
That’s the aptly named Mad Honey.
Made from the poisonous rhododendron plant in Turkey and the Himalayas, it has hallucinogenic
and psychoactive properties.
Nepalese honey-hunters scale vertical cliff faces to harvest it, whilst enduring a hundred
brutal bee stings.
A Greek army got off their tits on Mad Honey in 410 BC, when according to Xenophon's Anabasis,
on an expedition into Persian territory they came upon a village with lots of beehives
and gorged on it.
Some went mad, seemingly intoxicated, others appeared on the point of death – they all
fully recovered the following day and presumably remembered they were there to stab Persians,
not to get high.
And the bad news for you honey lovers out there is that while honey is effective when
applied externally, its health benefits are significantly less once digested – your
stomach acid rapidly denatures most of the beneficial molecules.
It certainly won’t cure Covid and since about 10% of honey contains botulism – the
deadliest toxin known to man – a teaspoon of it can kill an infant, but not an adult.
So then, why did your mother shove a teaspoon of honey down your throat when you had winter
sniffles?
Well, mother knows best and she might have been on to something.
Before it hits the stomach, honey coats your throat and esophagus as it slips down, thus
treating upper respiratory tract infections.
Honey has consistently beaten off-the-shelf cough suppressants and antihistamines to ease
coughs and sniffles in a number of clinical studies.
Honey’s antibacterial properties may prove to be humanity’s saviour in the decades
to come.
Every year antibiotic resistance becomes an increasingly pressing issue – the WHO estimates
antibiotic-resistant superbugs could kill over 10 million per year by 2050.
A pioneering team at the University of Birmingham are working on a range of honey-based sprays,
creams and a powder that will be able to treat infections and kill bacteria, even those that
fail to respond to modern antibiotics.
The powder is particularly exciting, because when mixed with water it creates a gel that
can be used in warzones.
Why is the team especially interested in re-purposing honey and not developing new antibiotics instead?
Because humans have been using it to treat infections for over 8,000 years and, unlike
modern medicine, bacteria has never been able to evolve a resistance to it.
It’s just as effective now as it was when caveman first smeared it on his sore nipple.
Furthermore, despite their best efforts, scientists have been unable to engineer bacteria that
is resistant to honey in the lab.
This is because honey doesn’t work like any other antibiotic.
As already mentioned, honey is a supersaturated solution, it has absorbed more sugar than
should be possible for the volume of water it contains.
This means honey is absolutely craving more water, and what does bacteria contain?
That’s right, a good dose of water, therefore when honey contacts a bacterium it rapidly
sucks all the water out, neutralising it.
Since this is a mechanical process, bacteria has never found a way to evolve a natural
defence against it, and there’s a good chance it never will.
Except for the botulism spores we mentioned earlier which only exist in honey because
they’re already dried out, so there’s no water for the honey to extract.
But pretty much nothing else stands a chance.
And yes, it’s ability to exterminate bacteria like a gloopy, sticky dalek is what gives
honey its eternal shelf-life.
So then, it turns out honey is magic after all.