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Honey is condensed nectar from flowers. It contains very little moisture, 12-17% by weight, and the rest is an assortment of simple sugars.
It takes about 12-13 pints of nectar to make 1 pint of honey. The bees put the nectar in open cells of comb and fan it with their wings to drive off the excess moisture. When the moisture content is right, they seal each cell with a wax cap to store it for future use.
There is a popular misconception that pollen is an ingredient of honey. There can be trace amounts of pollen mixed into honey, but it's not actually part of the honey. Pollen is the primary protein, fat, and mineral source for the bees, while honey is almost pure carbohydrate sugars.
Because of its extremely low moisture content, honey will keep indefinitely. In fact, still edible honey has been found in the burial chambers of Pharaohs in the Pyramids of Egypt!
The secret of honey's preservative power is that it contains less moisture than yeasts and bacteria do. It literally sucks the moisture out of bacteria, killing it in the process. A few types of bacteria have a casing around them that protects their moisture from honey, but they can only survive in honey. To multiply and thrive they must break through the protective casing, and that requires a higher moisture level than honey provides.
It's important to protect honey's low moisture levels to keep it from spoiling. Since it's so dry, honey acts as a moisture magnet. It will absorb humidity from the air, and can become moist enough to ferment in humid conditions. For this reason it's important to keep your honey in tightly sealed containers.
Granulation is strictly an esthetic problem. In fact, some people prefer their honey granulated, and creamed, or spun honey is finely granulated by design.
If you don't want your honey granulated, you can freeze it before granulation starts and keep it frozen until you are ready to use it. Do not refrigerate it though, since that will cause it to granulate very quickly.
Once your honey has granulated, you can gently warm it to dissolve the sugar crystals. but before you do, be sure to read the section entitled What is raw honey? below.
There is no legal definition for raw honey in the United States. At GBA we consider honey to be raw if it hasn't been heated above 120 degrees Farenheit. We chose this definition because it's unlikely that honey would ever be exposed to temperatures higher than that anywhere in nature. And beeswax, which is the natural storage container for honey, melts a little above 120 degrees Farenheit. A stricter definition that we try to achieve is a maximum heating to 95 degrees. That's about the highest temperature honey will ever see if it stays inside a beehive, which is where it really belongs. In fact, in the beehive, honey is kept at about that temperature all the time, suggesting that 90-95 degrees is probably the only proper temperature for honey. But that's a bit tricky for most of us to achieve.
Why, you ask, is this important? The floral aromatics in honey deteriorate when it's heated. The bees maintain the interior of the hive at about 92 degrees, and that temperature doesn't seem to be detrimental to the delicate flavor of honey. But even heating honey to 120 degrees for an extended period will begin to affect its flavor adversely.
Most honey that's sold in retail stores has been held at about 160 degrees for extended periods of time to make it flow quickly and facilitate the filtration and bottling process. Creative packers call this heating 'pasteurization', implying that it's a good thing for consumers. If you have read the section above entitled How long will honey keep?, you'll realize that pasteurization is entirely unnecessary for honey. Calling this process pasteurization is misleading at best.
Just remember when reading the label that there is no legal standard for raw honey. A packer could boil his honey and still put the word 'raw' on the label. Let the buyer beware. Your best bet for quality honey is to buy local, know the producer, and ask specific questions about how the honey was processed.
Sure! Why not. The notion of health food is a bit hard to pin down sometimes, but the term has been used for honey quite freely. Honey is a very pure and nearly sterile blend of simple sugars that assimilate quickly and efficiently into the bloodstream for an instant energy boost. Because of the type of sugars in honey, you don't get the subsequent letdown that table sugar can cause with its complex sugars. Beyond this, many claims have been made for honey which we will not address. It's enough in our opinion to say that honey is a wonderful food!
Inconclusive studies have been done that might suggest a link between honey and a rare disease of babies, called infant botulism. The link has never been conclusively proven. The studies listed a number of foods that could harbor the botulism spores, but did not definitively link any of them to infant botulism. To stay on the safe side, most authorities and experts have recommended that babies under 2 years old not be fed honey. It's true that botulism spores are among the few types of encapsulated bacteria that can survive in honey (See How long will honey keep? for more details.) Until the final verdict is in on infant botulism and honey, (and it probably never will be) it makes sense to follow the recommended guideline.
It appears that children over the age of 2 years have sufficiently developed immune systems to be safe from the problem, regardless of whether honey can cause it.
