50 Fun Facts About Honey

Honey is sweet mainly because of high concentrations of which two sugars?

It has roughly the same relative sweetness as table sugar, and a tablespoon carries about 43 kilocalories.

Besides floral nectar, honey bees also make honey from the sugary secretions of which insects?

That sticky liquid is called honeydew, and honey made from it tends to be dark and strong-tasting.

What shape are the cells of a honeycomb?

Bees eat roughly 8.4 pounds of honey to secrete a single pound of the wax the comb is built from.

Properly stored honey does not spoil. Which two properties are the main reason?

Bees also add glucose oxidase, which produces hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid, both of which suppress bacteria.

Cuevas de la Araña, with 8,000-year-old cave paintings of humans foraging for honey, is in which country?

The famous image shows a figure on a ladder or ropes reaching into a wild nest while bees fly around.

The oldest known honey remains, up to 5,500 years old, were found in a tomb in which country?

They turned up during construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline; the dead were buried with linden, berry and meadow-flower honeys for the afterlife.

Which country produces the most honey, about 24% of the world total?

Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran are the next-largest producers of the roughly 1.9 million tonnes made each year.

A foraging bee's honey stomach holds about 40 mg of nectar. What proportion of its own weight is that?

Filling it can mean visiting more than a thousand flowers and over an hour of continuous work.

Bees keep the honey-storage areas of the hive at roughly what temperature?

They are among the few insects that can generate large amounts of body heat, and they fan their wings to evaporate water from the ripening honey.

Finished honey has a water content of roughly what percentage?

Fresh nectar is 70-80% water; the bees evaporate most of it, then cap each cell with wax so no moisture can get back in.

On average, how much honey does a single hive produce in a year?

Before removable frames were invented, harvesters often destroyed the whole colony to take the honey and replaced it the next spring.

Why does smoke from a beekeeper's smoker calm bees?

The bees gorge on honey as if preparing to flee a forest fire, which makes them less inclined to sting.

Which American developed the movable-comb hive described in his 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee?

He was the first to exploit the 'bee space' of 6-9 mm that bees leave open rather than filling with wax.

Which Austrian ethologist decoded the honey bee's waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize?

The dance's angle from vertical on the comb tells other bees the direction of flowers relative to the sun, and its length tells the distance.

A honey bee's waggle dance traces out which shape?

Foragers use it to tell hive-mates the direction and distance to flowers, water or a possible new nest site.

Which secretion, fed to selected larvae, causes them to develop into queens rather than workers?

Workers extend the chosen cells and keep feeding the larvae the jelly instead of switching them to bee bread.

Roughly how many eggs can a well-mated, well-fed queen honey bee lay in a day?

The queen is the only fertile female in the colony, and her egg-laying can outweigh her own body mass over the course of a day.

Beeswax is produced by glands on which part of a worker bee's body?

Eight wax glands on the abdominal segments secrete tiny scales, and the glands wither as the bee ages into a forager.

What is the resinous 'bee glue' that honey bees make from tree buds and sap called?

Bees mix the resin with saliva and wax and use it to seal gaps in the hive.

Roughly how many species of bee are known, of which honey bees are only a small fraction?

All non-parasitic bumblebees and stingless bees make honey too, and Mayans farmed stingless bees long before Columbus.

The husbandry of stingless bees, practised by the Maya since pre-Columbian times, is known by what name?

Stingless bees store their honey in little pots of wax and resin rather than in hexagonal comb.

The alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water is called what?

It may be the oldest alcoholic drink of all, possibly discovered 20,000-40,000 years ago before agriculture or pottery.

Mead flavoured with spices has what name?

Melomel is the fruit version, and Norse myth held that the Mead of Poetry, brewed from the blood of Kvasir, turned drinkers into poets.

Mānuka honey comes from bees foraging on Leptospermum scoparium, a tree native to which country?

Mānuka is the tree's Māori name; the honey is marketed as 'liquid gold' and rated by the UMF grading system.

Which compound, abbreviated MGO, is the marker used to grade authentic mānuka honey?

Australian producers require independent lab tests for MGO, dihydroxyacetone and leptosperin before honey can carry the mark of authenticity.

Hallucinogenic 'mad honey' from rhododendron nectar is produced mainly in Turkey and which other country?

In Nepal it is harvested from cliff nests of the giant honey bee and prized as much for its effects as its taste.

In 65 BCE Mithridates reportedly used mad honey against the Roman soldiers of which general?

Xenophon had already described Greek soldiers near Trabzon being laid low by the same honey in 401 BCE.

Why should honey never be given to babies under one year old?

Honey can carry Clostridium botulinum spores that an infant's gut cannot yet control; after a year it is considered safe.

Glucose oxidase, added to nectar by bees, produces gluconic acid and which antibacterial compound?

That is one reason medical-grade honey products have been approved by the FDA for minor wounds and burns.

US honey colour is graded on which scale, from 0 ('water white') to over 114 ('dark amber')?

Grading is voluntary in the US and follows USDA standards; dark honeys such as buckwheat sit at the top of the scale.

Which honey, from a tree of the southeastern US, is famous for not crystallising?

Honeys high in fructose stay liquid longer, and tupelo is the classic example; it also lent its name to a Van Morrison album.

Honey made by bees kept near a single type of flower is described by what term?

Beekeepers place hives where the bees can reach little else; the volatile compounds in the honey can reveal which flowers were used.

How many times does the Hebrew Bible describe the Promised Land as 'the land of milk and honey'?

Scholars think the biblical 'honey' (devash) was often a syrup of dates or figs, since bee domestication is undocumented in the early Near East.

An entire chapter of the Quran is named an-Nahl, meaning what?

Honey has been valued as a medicine across the Islamic world since the earliest centuries of the faith.

Apples dipped in honey are eaten at which Jewish holiday to symbolise a sweet new year?

The custom was a medieval addition; some Sephardic tables also serve dates, pomegranates and a whole fish with the head intact.

How does Winnie-the-Pooh famously spell honey?

When he set out to give Eeyore a pot of it for his birthday, he ate the lot on the way and presented 'a useful pot to put things in' instead.

Which African birds lead humans to wild bee colonies to eat the leftover grubs and wax?

The family has 16 species; the birds are also reported to work with honey badgers.

Honey Nut Cheerios, the honey-flavoured spin-off of the cereal, was introduced in which year?

Its mascot BuzzBee later vanished from boxes for a time in a campaign to highlight declining bee populations.

Baklava is a layered pastry of filo and chopped nuts sweetened with syrup or what?

An ancient recipe sometimes cited as its ancestor was a nut-and-honey filling with no dough at all, closer to modern pasteli.

A beekeeper first reported the vanishing hives that led to the term colony collapse disorder in which year?

The first case classed as CCD came in mid-November 2006 from a Pennsylvania beekeeper overwintering his hives in Florida; in the UK it was nicknamed the Mary Celeste syndrome.

Unlike the queen's, the stinger of a worker western honey bee has what feature?

Contrary to popular belief a bee does not always die after stinging; it dies when the barbs catch in thick mammal skin and tear the sting free.

Roughly how much honey do bees consume to secrete one pound of beeswax?

That cost is why beekeepers often return empty comb to the hive after spinning the honey out in a centrifugal extractor.

Some wasps of the genus Brachygastra in the Americas are unusual because they do what?

Honey bees, bumblebees and stingless bees are the better-known honey makers, but these 'honey wasps' also feed on nectar and store it.

A standard tablespoon of honey provides roughly how many kilocalories?

Gram for gram it is about as sweet as sucrose, so it sweetens no more efficiently than table sugar.

Which sweetener became the most common adulterant in honey from the late 20th century?

Older frauds blended in maple, birch or sorghum syrup, or even mixed crystallised honey with flour, which only showed once the honey was heated.

Honey's ability to absorb moisture straight from the air is known by what term?

Because honey contains yeast, it must be kept sealed; fermentation usually starts once its water content climbs much above 25%.

In the UK, the creamed or whipped product is usually sold as what?

Processing it to hold many tiny crystals stops large ones forming and gives a smooth, spreadable texture.

What is the average pH of honey?

Values range from 3.4 to 6.1, and most of that acidity comes from gluconic acid formed by the bees' glucose oxidase.

Claims of edible honey recovered from Egyptian tombs have all turned out to be what?

Honey does keep for centuries when humidity is excluded, which is why the tomb legend has proved so durable.

Toxic honey in parts of New Zealand comes from honeydew of vine hoppers feeding on which bush?

The poison involved is tutin, and only the Coromandel Peninsula, Eastern Bay of Plenty and Marlborough Sounds regularly produce it.