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I Want Honey and I Mead It!

I have loved honey for as long as I can remember, and last summer when I tried mead for the

first time, I instantly attain an adoration alike to honey. Honey in and of itself is sweet, tasty, beyond-

palatable and not to mention nutritious. It complements copious culinary cuisines; it adds flavor and

body to desserts, tea, meats (not to mention it limits the carcinogenic byproducts of cooking meat), and

a myriad of other delicious delicacies. On top of making food more scrumptious, there are even

medicinal qualities to honey; on top of the nutrients that are ingested to support health, it can be used

topically on minor cuts and burns and also to help with acne. What I love about honey is that is mostly

based off of plant base product, other than the digestive enzymes and processes of the bees. I have

always wanted to learn beekeeping (Im excited about taking the course here at Cal Poly my last quarter

) due to the many uses that bees provide. Lastly, excess honey can be turned into another delicious

alcoholic product, mead. Unfortunately, I am no expert on bees and honey, yet, but I have researched a

variety of sources to discover more on what these amazing insects procure and offer. Now that we know

my interest in honey, I want to delve in deeper into bees, honey and mead.

The Honey bee is of the order Hymenoptera and the family Apidae, and on a stricter sense they

are one of seven members of the genus Apis; the most common is the Apis mellifera, the

domestic/European/Western honeybee. Honeybees are social insects that live in nests/hives that they

build, either as free standing colonies or within dead and hollowed trees. It is remarkable how well bees

work in unison so efficiently to do their many tasks which happen quickly without cessation. They have

two sets of eyes (two large compound eyes and three simple eyes [ocelli]) accompanied by two sensitive

odor-detecting antennae, giving them keen sensing ability. The sucking mouthpart is also called the

proboscis. A picture below is the basic anatomy of an apis mellifera:

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Honeybees have two sexes, male and female and the female sex is broken down further into

two castes: workers, who never attain sexual maturity and queens, who are larger sexually active

females. Females have the stingers, and the working caste does all the work for the hive; from gathering

nectar, to converting nectar to honey, to hive building and repairing, to tending to the queen and larva

et cetera. The males, also known as the drones, live off of all this work, do not have a stinger and are

just used for sex in the summer. The queen practices polyandry in that she fornicates with many

different males in order to add genetic diversity thereby improving the colonys likelihood of survival.

The queen has a spermathecal which stores bee sperm so that she can control when to fertilize her eggs.

The unfertilized eggs become drones, while the fertilized eggs become females. The females destined to

become queens get their own suite where they feast on royal jelly throughout their larva period, until

they have matured and then fight to the death for who will be the next reigning queen; the workers and

drones only get royal jelly/bee milk for their first three days of life.

Aristotle called honey, the nectar of the Gods, and I fully agree with him. Honey is so diverse

because it changes depending on the flower source that the base nectar comes from as well as the

particular enzymes of the bees taking part in the ripening of the honey. Different flowers produce

different nectars which become different colored and flavored honeys, which yield different nutritional

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content; according to Harold McGee, the most important nectar sources are from the bean and lettuce

families. Honey is an energy dense food, comprised mostly of sugars; fructose, glucose, sucrose,

maltose, isomaltose, maltulose, turanose, kojibiose, erlose, theanderose and panose in varying degrees

depending on the source of nectar. It is one of the most easily assimilated foods that contain enzymes

(invertase, amylase, glucose oxidase, catalase, and phosphorylase), pollen, antioxidants (flavonoids

[pinocembrin], ascorbic acid, catalase, chrysin, pinobanksin, and selenium), vitamins (riboflavin, niacin,

folic acid, pantothenic acid, ascorbic acid and B6), minerals (calcium, copper, sodium, iron, zinc,

potassium, phosphorus, magnesium, selenium, chromium and manganese) some microbes, some

protein (18 free amino acids, proline is most prevalent), beeswax, organic acids (acetic, butanoic, formic,

citric, succinic, lactic, malic, pyroglutamic, gluconic and a number of aromatic acids) and water, all of

which vary depending on the starting nectar and the processing and straining that the product

undergoes. Honey can come in different forms including liquid, whipped and comb. Liquid honey is

extracted from the hive and strained free of any crystals, wax and pulp. Whipped is finely crystallized,

and as the name implies is whipped vigorously to oxidize and make the honey more creamy and

spreadable. Comb honey comes as it was produced, in the wax comb with everything in it. Below is an

image from the chemical composition of honey source in References:

Honey is a phenomenal food, one most definitely dined on by the divine deities because it is a

nutrient-dense nutriment that is a process to create with the combined effort of thousands of bees.

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Using their long proboscis, a bee gathers nectar deep from within the flower and stores it in their honey

sac/crop/honey stomach that has glands attached to it which secretes enzymes that already begin

breaking down the starch before it even gets back to the hive. A single bee can carry about half of its

weight in nectar (about .002oz or.06gm), and takes about 25 roundtrips each day, traveling a mile one

way to forage for nectar. This nectar extraction process is a co-symbiotic relationship for the plant and

the bee (plant gets pollinated and bee gets some food for colony and we reap the excess benefits

without sowing). It is estimated that in order for a bee to make a pound of excess honey, it must forage

nectar for a flight path that would orbit the earth three times! Thankfully, that one bee is not by herself,

there are thousands to help and multiple generations; a bee foraging their entire life only contributes

only a small fraction of an ounce of honey to the hive, these statistics are startling!!! Once the bee

returns to the hive, they must release the nectar by regurgitation, before heading out to gather more.

There are other house bees that pump the nectar in and out of themselves (eat and vomit)

continuously forming thin droplets at the tip of their proboscis from which water can evaporate. This

process is repeated until about half of the water of the nectar is lost. Once the nectar is halfway

dehydrated, that concentrated nectar is placed in a thin film within the honeycomb where other young

workers continuously fan their wings to evaporate even more water via that air circulation. This process

is known as ripening and it takes about three weeks until the nectar has been ripened into honey;

ripening involves both the water evaporation and continuous work of the bees enzymes.

Honey can be ingested on its own, it can be used to accent dishes (especially baking due to its

hygroscopic properties that keep bread, cake, et cetera more moist than just sugar), and honey can be

used as medicine, and has been used for a really long time. The antimicrobial properties of honey is

largely due to the hydrogen peroxide by product of the glucose oxidase; it was utilized from people in

historical times as a food preservative. It is also beneficial with peptic ulcers, bed sores, infection

prevention, et cetera. Honey is characteristically acidic with a pH between 3.2-4.5; this is part of the

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reason why it has antimicrobial effects. Honey: its medicinal property and antibacterial activity goes

into detail of how and why honey is beneficial in numerous health related afflictions, and also has over

50 references supporting its claims. Honey has been used for thousands upon thousands of years by

man for food, medicine and alcoholic beverage. In the Spider Cave in Valencia, Spain depicts people

raiding wild beehives and it dates back to about 8000 b.c.e. The early Egyptians actually practiced

beekeeping to have a steady supply of honey. A palynological (dealing with spores and pollen) study

analyzed human coprolites and earthenware from burial sites from Birka, Sweden and Durrnberg,

Austria found that mead and honey was consumed from at least the 27th and 25th centuries B.C.!

Mead is a delicious alcoholic beverage that can resemble beer or wine, depending on yeast and

other ingredients used; although it predominantly resembles grape wine. An unfortunate part of mead

is that it takes a notoriously long time to reach completion. The honey type has an effect on the

fermentation time, but the proper yeast strains, agitation during fermentation, controlling pH and yeast

nutrition can increase the fermentation rate drastically. In the Common Mead Faults referenced

article, it describes different problems that arise out of the fermentation process and ways to fix it. The

quality of the ingredients (honey, water and yeast) plays a paramount role in the end result of the mead.

Also, the initial sterilization, either by boiling or fast freezing the must, is crucial to not have the wrong

microbes in the must which can cause spoilage yielding an inedible final product; boiling losses many

volatile components that add to flavor and body of the honey leading to the mead, whereas fast

freezing (holding must at -80 C for an hour) retained volatile components yet destroyed the microbes

before the yeast is added.

Alcohol is usually made from surplus product; if we are not able to ingest it in time, we might as

well let the right kind of microbes work on the excess product to procure a delicious alcoholic beverage;

of course we could always compost the excess, I would do half and half. With excess honey, one can

make mead. The honey is its own superfood that takes a lot of work from bees to procure; from

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harvesting nectar to ripening to the final honey product. Honey is so beneficial and tied to human lives

that we even use it as a term of endearment; I love you, Honey. The USDA estimates that about 1/3 of

our food supply is due to the pollination of plants from insects, and 80% of that is due to bees. What an

unfortunate world we would be living in without bees. I love bees and have a great admiration and

respect for them; even more so after doing all this research and learning more details about what they

do to procure a food product I love so much.

References:

Meads http://wine.about.com/od/winearoundtheworld/a/

Honey: its medicinal property and antibacterial action

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3609166/

Honey recipies http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/honey

Honey Bees: A History http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/honey-bees-a-history/comment-

page-1/?_r=0

History of Honey Bees and Human Management of Apis mellifera

http://archaeology.about.com/od/hterms/qt/Honey-Bees.htm

Ancient History of Bee Honey http://www.aloelf.com/bee-honey/ancient-history-of-bee-honey/

Honey could cure your infection http://modernfarmer.com/2014/09/honey-drugs-cure-infections/

Bee Movie 2007

On Food and Cooking: second edition Harold McGee; pgs 646-647, 663-667

Honeybee http://www.britannica.com/animal/honeybee

Royal jelly http://www.britannica.com/science/royal-jelly

Honey http://www.britannica.com/topic/honey

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http://storyofhoney.com/

the Composition of Honey by Jonathan White Jr. http://www.honey.com/images/uploads/white/white44-

the-composition-of-honey.pdf

the Chemical Composition of honey http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/webprojects2001/loveridge/index-

page3.html

Palynological evidence of mead: a prehistoric drink dating back to the 3rd millennium b.c. by Dagfinn Moe
and Klaus Oeggl. Veget Hist Archaeobot (2014) 23:515-526. DOI 10.1007/s00334-013-0419-x

Humans, the Honey Hunters http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/humans-the-honey-

hunters-9760262/

A History of Honey Bees in the Hawaiian Islands by Kevin M. Roddy and Lorna Arita-Tsutsumi. J. Hawaiian
Pacific Agric. 8:59-70 (1997)

Phenolic profile and antioxidant activity of Polish meads by Socha, R.; Pajak, P. international Journal of
Food Properties Volume 18, Issue 12, pages 2713-2725
http://apps.webofknowledge.com/full_recod.do?product=CABI&sea...

Honey sterilization and Mead Production by andreea c. Sarba; Liniu Marghitas. Bulletin UASVM animal
science and biotechnologies 71(2)/2014

Common Mead Faults by Andreea Sarba, Adrian Timar. UASVM (universitatea de stiinte agricole si
medicina veterinara) vol. xiii/a. 2014

Development of Protocol for Mead Preparation Using Different Sources of Honey by Prasad, H.J., G.
Bharamappa. IJTA. National Academy of Agriculture Science (NAAS) Rating: 3.03. volume 32, No.3-4, July-
December 2014

Development in the Fermentation Process and Quality Improvement Strategies for Mead Produciton by
Antonio Iglesias, Ananias Pascoal. www.mdpi.com/journal/molecules molecules 2014, 19, 12577-12590;
doi: 10.3390/molecules190812577

http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/how-to-brew/mead/making-mead/