Honey: I’m asked quite often what honey is, So I thought I might answer that question.
It’s an amazing thing to think that a plant has come up with a way to reward a bee (and other animals) so they will visit it and thus pollinate its flowers. In a flower you will find a liquid in the very bottom, this is called nectar (it quite nice to put your finger in and taste this liquid). Honey is produced using the nectar from a flower.
Nectar is a sweet liquid that the plant makes to reward the bee for coming along.
The bees use their tongues to drink the nectar and it goes into a storage space in the bee called a honey tummy. When the bee collects the nectar she adds enzymes to it and when she passes it onto other bees in the hive they also add enzymes and help to dehydrate the nectar.
At this point the nectar is around 80 to 85% water and 15 to 20% sugars (this does vary from plant to plant). The sugars in nectar are made up of Fructose, Dextrose, Sucrose, Maltose. Honey also has around 180 other identified substances in it.
The bees then place this nectar into wax cells inside the hive. At this point the nectar still needs to be ripened (dehydrated) it is not honey yet. So every night the bees sit over the cells and fan warm air over the nectar at temperatures around 35c. Over time the water in the nectar is dehydrated so that the finished product we call honey is around 15% water and 85% sugars. The bees then put a thin skin of wax over the cell, just like we put a lid on a jar. They can then come along and open the cell at anytime to use the honey.
RAW HONEY
Real raw honey is honey which is either not heated at all after it is extracted from the hive or has not been heated above 37c. That's our body temperature. What happens to honey when it is heated above 37c is the enzymes are destroyed and as the temperature increases the sugars that make up the honey change and you end up with a sweetener which has a GI of around 90 (sugar is 100 on the scale) while raw honey can be as low as 35 GI . One can be a pre-biotic while the other is just a sugar.
