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Botanical name or scientific name: None, the chemical formula of honey is C6H12O6
Other common names: Nectar, Sap, Mel, Mele, Madhu, and Ambrosia
Popular types of honey: Wildflower honey, Alfalfa honey, Manuka honey, Clover honey, Acacia honey, Buckwheat honey, Creamed honey, and Eucalyptus honey.
Earliest recorded medicinal uses: 2600-2200 BC in the Egyptian Edwin Smith Papyrus describes using honey 500 times in 900 remedies. 2100 BC a clay tablet from the Euphrates Valley references honey as a drug and ointment. 380 BC Aristotle described honey as a salve for wounds and eye sores.
I could fill pages and pages with the uses for honey! To access the beneficial uses of honey the most important rule to follow is using unpasteurized raw true honey! 95% of what you find on the grocery store shelves is NOT true honey unless you shop at a natural or specialty shop type grocery store. The FDA does not require honey to be labeled if there is added sugar or corn syrup, it has to be added to the daily value nutritional facts but not listed on the ingredient list. You then end up with the chemicals from refining the sugar that are not required by the FDA to be listed. These chemicals include sulfur dioxide, phosphoric acid, calcium hydroxide, formic acid, sodium hypochlorite, caustic soda, and hydrofluoric acid. Along with chemicals used for the boiler water treatment, and the cooling water treatment. The amount of chemicals used in refining sugar is horrific!
Pasteurized honey makes no sense, it destroys almost all of the honey’s natural benefits. Raw honey is the earth’s oldest preservative, between its sugar content that prevents bacteria growth and its natural hydrogen peroxide that prevents any growth of microbes, it cannot go bad if pure unadulterated raw honey and is stored properly. The oldest edible honey ever found is thought to be a 5,500-year-old ceramic vessel from a female noblewoman’s tomb in Borjomi, Georgia. 3,500-year-old edible honey was found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt. Pasteurizing makes no sense!
Avoid Diabetics should monitor blood sugar while using honey. Infants under 1 year old. To date, worldwide there have been 35 instances of C.botulinum spores have been found in honey fed to infants.
Constituents include but are not limited to natural raw honey fructose and glucose accounting for most up to 90%. Other sugars include maltrose, sucrose, isomaltose turanose, nigerose, meli-biose, panose, maltotriose, and melezitose. Probiotic agents like fructooligosaccharides. Minerals like potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium, sulphur, and trace amounts of iron, copper, zinc, and manganese. Vitamins C, thiamine, riboflavin, nicotinic acid, pantothenic acid, folate, and niacin. There are approximately 200 different constituents or substances in raw honey.
Its potential health benefits include but are not limited to topical wound healing, antioxidants, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, soothing cough, gut support rich in probiotics, combats mycotoxins in the gut, improving brain function by controlling oxidative stress, allergy relief, treating eye diseases topically, balancing blood pressure, raises red and white blood cell count, antidepressant, anti-fungal, and anti-anxiety.
A few remedies
Allergies-
Use 2 tablespoons of local raw honey to help control pollen allergies. Must be local to you to be helpful.
Arthritis-
2 tablespoons honey, 1 teaspoon Ceylon cinnamon in 8 ounces hot water. Once in the morning and again at night. May add ¼ teaspoon cayenne for improved circulation.
Anti-inflammatory-
Tea 12 ounces hot water, 1/2 teaspoon ground dried turmeric, ¼ ground dried teaspoon ginger, 1-2 tablespoons honey, just a pinch of fresh cracked pepper a must! The liver dislikes turmeric but despises piperine, this increases curcumin's bioavailability by up to 2,000%. By essentially distracting the liver and allowing the turmeric to slip by. Cover and let steep for 5-7 minutes. May add milk of choice.
Burns-
Apply a thin layer of honey to any burns. Works fantastic on sunburns.
Electrolyte-
2 cups water, 1 freshly squeezed organic lemon, lime, or orange, ¼ teaspoon true salt like Himalayan or Celtic never iodized salt, and 2 teaspoons honey.
Eyes-
Always use distilled water when using in eyes. Mix raw honey, Manuka is best, with distilled water in equal parts. 2-3 drops per eye. Useful for conjunctivitis, cataracts, chemical and thermal burns of the eyes, keratitis, and corneal eye ulcers.
Flu or cold-
8-10 cloves peeled fresh organic garlic, 4 tablespoons fresh organic ginger, 5 whole organic lemons juiced, 6-8 tablespoons honey, ½ tablespoon cayenne pepper, and 3-4 cups fresh organic pineapple juice. Blend well, drink ½ cup as needed up to 6 times a day, and keep refrigerated.
Sleep-
When there is not enough liver glycogen to fuel the brain during sleep our adrenal glands release adrenalin and cortisol causing poor rest. Consuming 1 tablespoon of honey before bed supplies the liver with needed supplements for glycogen, preventing the release of stress hormones and increasing insulin levels resulting in the production of serotonin and melatonin. NEVER use melatonin supplements, you are training your body to stop natural production of melatonin that may not be reversible.
Sore throat-
2 tablespoons honey, ½ of a freshly squeezed organic lemon, 2 tablespoons raw apple cider vinegar, and ½ teaspoon ground Ceylon cinnamon. Mix with 12 ounces of hot water every 4 hours as needed.
1 tablespoon honey, ½ of a fresh squeezed organic lemon.
Toothache-
Mix 2 teaspoons of ground cloves with 1 tablespoon of honey, and apply as needed.
Infused honey
Flavored or infused honey also called a Mel are fantastic! You get the benefits of the raw honey and the benefits of the herb infused. Great for use in teas, dressings, sauces, marinades or just in a glass of water to dress it up. I use dehydrated ingredients for almost all my flavored honey, so I do not have to refrigerate them. Aged fermented garlic honey is made with whole fresh garlic cloves and is one that does not need refrigeration, most fresh herbs in honey need refrigeration. My oldest one is about 3 years old and tastes fantastic! These do take longer to infuse flavors and benefits, I let mine go 4 months before I start using. I do not worry about straining or removing herbs, most of the time I just add them to whatever I'm using them in. You will want to flip jars every week or so to help infusion and store in a cool dry area.
Garlic- Fill jar 2/3 with whole pierced organic garlic cloves and fill with honey, you will need to burp daily for the first 10 days. The consistency of honey will become more watery, the honey and garlic will darken after a few months and become more mellow in flavor.
Elderberry- 1 cup dehydrated organic elderberries to 3 cups of honey. May add cloves, dried lemons, or cinnamon. There are no worries about cyanide poisoning from dried elderberry.
Jalapeno- 1 cup dehydrated organic jalapeños with or without seeds depending on how hot you want it, to 3 cups of honey.
Orange, lemon, or grapefruit- Sliced dehydrated organic oranges. Citrus peels hold a huge amount of the herbicides and pesticides used in conventional growing practices, these chemicals will be in your honey. Layer jar in dehydrated citrus rounds filling with honey every few layers to ensure coverage.
Spiced- I use whole herbs in this recipe. ¼ cup of each star anise, cloves, hand-crushed Ceylon cinnamon and allspice. Mix in with 3 cups of honey.
Ginger- 1 cup diced dehydrated ginger mixed in 3 cups of honey. For fresh 1 cup finely diced or shredded ginger 2 cups honey. 5-7 days leave on counter top and burp daily, then place in refrigerator and stir weekly.
Cranberry- I've made with both dehydrated and fresh cranberry honey. I prefer fresh cranberry honey but you must refrigerate. For dehydrated no need to refrigerate, 1 cup cranberries to 2 cups honey. For fresh 1 cup chopped cranberries 2 cups honey. First 5-7 days leave on counter top and burp daily, then place in refrigerator and stir about once a week.
A lid at the opposite end from the bees’ entrance allowed the bee-keeper to grab the honeycomb
Israel is referred to repeatedly in the Bible — 17 times, in fact — as the “land of milk and honey,” but until 2005 archaeologists had discovered little firm evidence that beekeeping was ever practiced there. Many scholars, in fact, assumed “honey” referred to a nectar from dates or other fruits.
Then, three years ago in 2006, researchers found a 3,000-year-old apiary in the Iron Age city of Tel Rehov in the Jordan Valley, the oldest known commercial beekeeping facility in the world, suggesting that the word “honey” likely referred to the real thing. Now the same researchers have gotten an even bigger surprise: The bees that were kept in the hives were most likely from Turkey, hundreds of miles away.
Article https://www.bibleplaces.com/blog/2010/06/evidence-of-honeybees-in-ancient-israel/
Bees used these holes to enter and exit from the ancient clay hives at Tel Rehov, Israel.
“This is a very special discovery … because there is no evidence from before for bringing any kind of animals from such a distance, especially bees, which represent a quite complicated, sophisticated type of agriculture,” said archaeologist Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lead author of a report published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “This throws new light on the economy of the biblical period.” The findings “would imply an incredible amount of commodity trading of bees,” said bee expert Gene Kritsky of the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, editor of American Entomologist. The importation of Italian bees to the United States in the 1860s “was thought to be a big deal then,” he said, “but the Israelis may have been doing this as far back as the first millennium BC.”
Photos https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19013-biblical-bee-keepers-picked-the-best-bees/