Honey




Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers. The variety produced by honey bees (the genus Apis) is the one most commonly referred to, as it is the type of honey collected by most beekeepers and consumed by people.

 High-quality honey can be distinguished by fragrance, taste, and consistency. Ripe, freshly collected, high-quality honey at 20 °C (68 °F) should flow from a knife in a straight stream, without breaking into separate drops.After falling down, the honey should form a bead. The honey, when poured, should form small, temporary layers that disappear fairly quickly, indicating high viscosity. If not, it indicates excessive water content (over 20%) of the product. Honey with excessive water content is not suitable for long-term preservation.

Honey is mainly devoid of essential nutrients, containing only trace amounts ofprotein, dietary fiber, vitamins or minerals (table).

A mixture of sugars and other carbohydrates, honey is mainly fructose (about 38-55%) and glucose (about 31%), with remaining sugars including maltose, sucrose, and other complex carbohydrates. Its glycemic index ranges from 31 to 78, depending on the variety.The specific composition, color, aroma and flavor of any batch of honey depend on the flowers foraged by bees that produced the honey
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Typical honey analysis:

Fructose: 38.2%
Glucose: 31.3%
Maltose: 7.1%
Sucrose: 1.3%
Water: 17.2%
Higher sugars: 1.5%
Ash: 0.2%
Other/undetermined: 3.2%

Honey has a density of about 1.36 kilograms per litre (36% denser than water).


Health applications

In myths and folk medicine, honey has been used both orally and topically to treat various ailments including gastric disturbances, ulcers, skin wounds, and skin burns by ancient Greeks, Egyptians and in Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine.

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