Honey trivia

There are all kinds of interesting facts about honey. Here’s a hodgepodge of trivia that might improve your chances of winning a quiz show.

• Honey has antibacterial properties and is used in some cultures to prevent infection of cuts and burns. A medico friend of mine recently visited a burn clinic in China where honey is used in the patients’ dressings.
• In olden days, a common practice was for newlyweds to drink mead (honey wine) for one month (one phase of the moon) to assure the birth of a son. Thus the term “honeymoon.”
• The honey bee’s image became a symbol for kings and religious leaders and was honored on ancient coins and in mythology.
• One gallon of honey (3.79 liters) weighs 11 lbs., 13.2 ounces (5.36 kg.).
• The Romans used honey to pay their taxes (I don’t think the IRS would approve).
• Honey found in the tombs of the Egyptian Pharaohs was still edible. That’s an impressive shelf life!
• To produce 1 pound of honey, the bees must visit 2 million flowers!

Profting from a GOLD Mine

                               Food for free?

If you look at fields full of flowering crops or wild flowers in the countryside, or at garden and park flowers in the cities, you are not only looking at beauty but also at gold  thousands of tons of valuable honey. Liquid gold sitting there, all for you! If you don’t go and get it, the flowers will die at the end of the season and all those tons of honey will go to waste. All that money will simply have dried up in front of your eyes. If, on the other hand, you have bees, they will go and get it for you for free, and you can then either eat it or sell it or both.

Bees are probably the only livestock that use other people’s land without permission and those landowners welcome them. It is a win-win situation for the bee and for everyone else. Your bees are happy carrying out their work; you can enjoy your hobby or business, and if you want to you can make a profit; the farmers get their crops pollinated and so they make a profit; the shops obtain food to sell and they make a profit; the general public have food to eat; and the government is happy that its agricultural and environmental sectors are running smoothly and that somewhere along the line they will be able to raise some tax.

Bees and the economy

Don’t forget that governments regard the whole set-up as so important that they are willing to spend millions on ensuring that the status quo does not change and that nothing happens to harm it. Recent research in the USA has valued crops that require pollination by honey-bees at an estimated $24 billion annually, and the value of commercial bee pollination on contracts at around $10 billion annually. These are huge figures by any standard and they show that bees are big business.

Using honey in medicine

Honey sale value, on the other hand, is much less, at $285 million annually in the USA. However, now that hard clinical trials are showing that certain types of honey can provide antibiotic wound treatments more effectively and with fewer side-effects than conventional treatments, this non-pollination side of beekeeping has become a rapidly growing industry. Active manuka honey has been shown to beat the MRSA super-bug with no side-effects to the patient and is used in burn dressings. Buckwheat honey has been found in clinical trials to be more effective as a cough treatment than many over-the-counter cough medicines. Honey is no longer old Gran’s remedy for colds or an ‘alternative’ therapy. It is now a mainstream medicine available on national health systems and used in hospitals in the UK, the USA and other countries.

Malik
(Author)

About Admin:

Malik Currently working as Marketing Executive at Oasis Agro Industries Pakistan, and hobbies to read about agriculture, share latest information with others