What is nature’s golden nectar

My answer is Honey. Honey make a sweet addition to your tea, coffee, oats and many more breakfast meals, but it’s not just a tasty treat; honey also has medical benefits.

Pure honey Pixabay

What is honey
Honey is a sweet syrupy substance made from nectar of flowers by the honey bees. The foraging bees visit tens of thousands of flowers during the day. They collect nectars from the flowers and make a round trip back to their hives. Honey bees in the hive process this nectar by adding their own enzymes to it while also reducing its water content by exposing it to air via their mouth-parts. Once the nectar is processed and thickened it is stored in the cells of the hive as honey and plugged by a covering of beeswax. Honey is stored by the bees to be used as an energy store in times of need especially when they can’t go out in the winter. Humans extract this honey from the bee colony but the good news is that the bees produce more than the need so humans in actual fact do not harm the bees by taking their energy stores. Honey is extracted by taking out the frames from the honey bee colony in a centrifugal extractor or by squeezing the combs full of honey using a cloth as a sieve, this method is widely used by developing countries that do not have sophisticated machinery for extraction. Alternatively, cut comb can be eaten directly.

Bee colony Pixabay

Honey is one of the few remaining natural commodity or food in our contemporary market. Most of the honeys we buy are synthetic ones. I hear some are done by adding a large amount of burnt foam to a small portion of the honey with addition to sugar in other to gain more profits. People are indeed wicked. So how do you differentiate a good honey from an artificial honey. There are a lot of ways to do so, at least I know of three. The thump test, the water test and the flame test.

The thump test
Pour a drop of honey on your thump.
Check to see if it’ll spill.
If it spills, the honey is adulterated or not pure.
Because pour honey is very viscous.

Thump Shutterstock

The water test
Take a clear glass of water
Add one teaspoon of honey into the glass
If the honey dissolves in the water it is fake.
Pure honey should sink to the bottom because of its viscosity.

Pouring honey Pixabay

The flame test
Take a match stick and dip it in the honey.
Strike the match stick to the match box like you are lighting the match.
If it catches fire it is pure because organic honey is flammable. If not, it is adulterated because of the impurities add to with which draws moist to the honey.
I hope y’all steemians have learnt something small about my research. In my next series, I will be discussing the historical use of honey, honey and ancient religions, honey in Islam and the decline of honey.