Honey, I'm Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World
184
Honey, I'm Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive across the Centuries and around the World
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090042 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 184 |
| File size: | 543 KB |
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Honey, I'm Homemade
SWEET TREATS FROM THE BEEHIVE ACROSS THE CENTURIES AND AROUND THE WORLDUniversity of Illinois Press
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07744-9
Chapter One
Honey: The A-Bee-Cs
Honey is, simply put, the nectar of flowers, collected, transported, regurgitated, concentrated, biochemically processed, and packaged by Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee. Honey bees use sugar-rich nectar as the foundation for a supplementary food for their baby grubs and as an energy source for workers. Its inauspicious beginnings notwithstanding, honey has been a highly valued human commodity for millennia. In fact, the oldest artistic depictions of insects are cave paintings of honey bees disturbed by a human honey hunter. More than a hundred such rock art images in over a dozen countries in three continents have been found to date; those in Europe date back six thousand years, and some in Africa may be more than ten thousand years old. In every case, human figures are depicted clinging perilously to slender ropes or ladders removing honey while clouds of angry bees surround them. Around the world, people have long been aware of the remarkable nature of honey.
Honey has proved worth the effort expended to swipe it from bees—it is, after all, one of very few concentrated sources of sweetness available in nature. Biologically speaking, the human species, Homo sapiens, has a sweet tooth—or, more accurately, a sweet tongue. On the tip of the tongue are taste buds, or papillae, equipped with nerve cells specifically wired to respond to sweetness. The ability to taste sweet substances has been extremely useful throughout the history of humans. In nature, most potential foods that taste sweet are safe; natural poisons tend to be sour or bitter. Thus, it is not surprising that tasting sweet substances is a source of pleasure—it's a potent reward and reinforcement for finding something safe to eat.
Compared to most of the other natural sources of sweetness, honey is relatively easy to obtain. It comes conveniently packaged in little wax containers, essentially ready to eat without further preparation—unless you consider outrunning or outsmarting hordes of angry bees as part of the preparation. It is also available in most places year-round. Sugar from sugarcane, a reedy plant in the grass family native to tropical South Asia, requires harvesting the plants, crushing their stems, collecting the juice, cleaning up contaminants, and boiling down the syrup, a process that consumes precious combustible fuel. Maple syrup, made from the sap of North American maple trees, requires waiting for spring, drilling holes in many trunks, tapping trees, waiting for sap to run out, collecting the sap, and boiling it down for days at temperatures exceeding 212 degrees. Just about any other plant juice—agave nectar, date palm syrup, sorghum syrup—requires weeks of waiting, days of harvesting, and hours and hours of boiling at high temperature at the cost of using up valuable fuel.
So it's not that surprising that beehives, which can contain upwards of two hundred pounds of honey, have been tempting targets for enterprising humans. At first, honey was just stolen from bees, at considerable risk to life and limb. A few cultures in the world still make a living in this way. The Veddas in the forests of Sri Lanka, for example, are among several southeastern Asian indigenous people who rely upon bees to meet most of their material needs. Although Europeans have had to make do with only one species of Apis, the Veddas interact with several. Apis dorsata live in high trees on hillsides; Apis indica nest in hollow trees and rock crevices; and the dwarf bee, Apis florea, inhabit rock ledges. Honey is collected with the use of long ladders, bamboo canes, and smoking torches.
Most likely due to a desire to make the honey supply more reliable and less life-threatening, the semidomestication of bees—beekeeping—began very early in human history. Recent archeological excavations revealed the remains of an active honey industry dating back to 900 bce in the ancient city of Rehov in what is now Israel. More than thirty intact hives, made of unfired clay and neatly stacked, were recovered from the ruins. Temple and tomb art dating to 2400 bce depicts similar scenes. The sun temple of Neuserre, close to Cairo and dating to the Fifth Dynasty, depicts honey processing and packaging, and hieroglyphs that are three thousand years old show sales records. Ancient Egyptians also made mead, or honey wine, probably the world's oldest alcoholic beverage.
In ancient Greece, honey bees were kept in clay hives etched on the inside with ridges to provide a rough surface for the workers to use to anchor the comb. Honey is mentioned not only in the philosophical works of Plato and Democritus but also in Homer's epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad. The honey of Attica, a region approximately forty square miles in size, was particularly well regarded for its medicinal properties, and by the fifth century bce more than twenty thousand hives were maintained there. Like the Egyptians, the Greeks fermented honey to produce wine and often mixed it with grape wine to produce a beverage called oenomel; according to The Odyssey, honey was also an ingredient in kykeon, a sort of barley gruel mixed with wine and goat cheese.
The ancient Romans were also avid beekeepers, maintaining colonies in no fewer than nine types of hives ranging from simple hollow logs to elaborate woven wicker structures. Virgil's Georgics, a treatise on agricultural practices of the day, includes an entire volume (Volume 4) devoted to beekeeping in verse. Athenfus's Deipnosophistae, a dialogue on controversies of the day, includes information on meals and how to prepare them; among the recipes was one for enkhytoi, a honey cake made from eggs, honey, and flour. Most of what is known of Roman-era cooking, however, comes from a collection of recipes known collectively as Apicius. References to honey abound—in dulcia, or honey-sweetened pastries, cakes and breads topped with honey, and honey puddings. Beyond desserts, honey was used to cure or glaze meats and sweeten beverages, including mulsum, a honey-sweetened wine.
Long before the Romans conquered ancient Britain, the locals practiced beekeeping (as well as honey hunting). Honey was a staple not only for cooking but also for making mead. It was held in such high value that taxes, tolls, and tributes were often paid in honey. By the twelfth century, beekeepers in Britain were using skeps, upright hives made of coiled straw, although the concept likely originated earlier on the continent, with Germanic tribes west of the Elbe River. The word honey also derives from the ancient Britons (etymologically entering the language as the Old English hunig). Beekeeping and the use of bee products (including wax for candles) spread throughout Europe, and honey was integrated into most cuisines.
Reluctant to leave their principal sweetener behind, European colonists brought honey bees with them to the New World. Honey bees survived the Atlantic crossing by 1622, and escaped swarms established populations of feral bees across the continent. Although sugar supplanted honey as the principal sweetener in the United States, beekeeping did not disappear. Rather, apiculture underwent its most radical transformation in centuries in 1851, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, the Rev. Lorenzo L. Langstroth, an avid beekeeper, invented the first practical movable frame hive, designed so that a comb could be removed without destroying the rest of the hive. Langstroth's hive design, which had wooden frames around the comb that could be moved in and out of the hive box with ease, separate honey compartments, and tiered boxes that could be picked up and transported individually, is still the favored design in honey-producing countries around the world.
How Bees Make Honey
Honey may be considered by humans to be unprocessed, but in fact it is highly processed—the processor just happens to have six, instead of two, legs. Honey bees for the most part depend on flowers for food, a challenge inasmuch as flowers are not particularly abundant, predictable, or long-lived plant parts. The principal raw materials of the honey bee diet—pollen and nectar—change in availability and location over the season. Their sophisticated social structure and ability to communicate allow honey bees to survive on such unpredictable resources. They famously "dance" to convey directional information to hive mates. Foragers that find a rich nectar source return to the hive and communicate its location and distance by performing a dance. The "waggle dance," performed when the nectar source is more than three hundred feet from the hive, conveys information about distance and location. The dance is basically in the shape of a figure eight. The number of circuits completed on the comb and the number of times a dancing bee waggles her abdomen on the central part of the 8 indicate the distance; the angle of the straightaway run, relative to the vertical line of the comb, represents the angle of the nectar source relative to the sun. Because bees can see polarized light and thus can identify the sun's location even under cloudy conditions, honey bee "GPS with turn-by-turn directions" works in all kinds of weather.
The sophisticated communication system of the honey bee—the only symbolic language known in an invertebrate and rivaling human communication for precision—is incredibly handy for utilizing a resource—nectar—that is unpredictable and ephemeral. Whatever their species, individual flowers generally produce only tiny quantities of nectar, so up to one hundred thousand loads of nectar are required to produce a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of honey. One load of nectar, however, can require visiting at least a thousand individual flowers, so the 2.2 pounds of honey are the result of visits to as many as ten million flowers. Depending on how close together the flowers grow, visiting ten million may necessitate flying up to 240,000 miles—nearly the equivalent of circumnavigating the earth ten times. Bees have certainly earned their reputation for busyness.
Nectar is generally concealed in floral structures in some way (to reduce its vulnerability to visitors who take nectar without pollinating). Honey bees are equipped with highly modified mouthparts that form a tongue—a kind of lapping-sucking structure—with which to remove nectar. A forager visiting a flower swallows the nectar she collects, but it doesn't go into an ordinary stomach;—it is diverted to a sacklike honey stomach for transport back to the hive. Once a forager returns to the hive, she regurgitates the load and in that way delivers it to a hive bee, which then begins the process of converting nectar into honey. Divested of her burden, the forager is free to go out again in search of more nectar.
Nectar is mostly water with a low concentration of sugars; the first step in converting it to honey is to reduce the water content from about 80 to 90 percent to about 13 to 18 percent. Hive bees concentrate the nectar by regurgitating droplets onto their tongues over and over again—up to two hundred times. While some bees are regurgitating nectar, others are busy fanning their wings up to twenty-five thousand times per minute to circulate air and accelerate evaporation.
Evaporation is only one of the chemical changes involved in converting nectar into honey. The honey bee's saliva contains an enzyme, invertase, which converts sucrose, a complex sugar (called a disaccharide because it has two component parts) into its component simple sugars (monosaccharides), fructose and glucose. Breaking down sucrose into its component monosaccharides is essentially predigesting it, making it easy for grubs and workers to process. From the human perspective, the conversion also makes honey taste sweeter; fructose is about 70 percent sweeter than sucrose to humans. Also mixed with the nectar is glucose oxidase, an enzyme in honey bee saliva that reacts with glucose in nectar to produce gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide acts as a sterilizing agent in honey, and gluconic acid lowers its pH, which also discourages microbial growth.
After all of the biochemical processing is complete, the incipient honey is packaged by placing it into wax cells, where it continues to lose water until it reaches its final concentration. Honey processing does not end with reducing water content; before the honey is capped with wax it sits in the hive for a few days. As it happens, at the hive temperature of about 95 degrees, many potentially toxic nectar constituents that have been concentrated break down. One of the great advances in the history of human civilization was the discovery of fire and with it the invention of cooking, a method of food processing that helped to reduce toxicity of plant foods. Honey bees beat humans to the idea of cooking by about sixty million years.
Once processed, the honey will keep for days, weeks, months, or even years. Honey resists decay for several reasons, the principal one being that microbes cannot grow well in honey because of its low water content. Living cells require water to survive. In fact, mead, wine made from fermented honey, can be produced fairly easily by introducing a small amount of water into honey, which will allow yeasts to flourish. Honey's acidic pH also discourages microbial growth, and many nectars that are made into honey contain plant chemicals that are toxic to microbes. There are archaeological excavations at which honey in good condition has been unearthed in sealed containers that are more than a thousand years old.
Although bees are responsible for many of honey's most desirable properties, plants must get some credit, too. Honey color is a function of the pigments that are present in plant nectar. The "bouquet" of honey is a function of the essential oils produced by flowers to attract pollinators. Nectar also happens to be the source of vitamins and minerals in honey. Not inappropriately, the B-vitamins (bee-vitamins?), which are water-soluble, are present in abundance. Vitamin C, another water-soluble vitamin, can also be found in some honeys. The fat-soluble vitamins, including A, E, and K, are present in trace amounts. Nectar also is the source of minerals—potassium, abundant in nectar, is consequently abundant in honey, and calcium, magnesium, sodium, phosphorus and sulfur occur in smaller amounts.
To be fair, nectar is also occasionally the source of toxins. Some plants infuse their nectar with poisonous substances to deter inappropriate visitors, and, occasionally, bees collect this nectar and concentrate it to produce honey that can either make them sick or, sometimes, do the same to humans. Toxic honeys, however, are very rare; bees seem to do a good job of screening nectars for toxins before processing them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Honey, I'm Homemade Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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