Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Honey along with all the Honey containing recipes presented on this site, with 617 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Honey recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Honey as a major wild food ingredient.



We are all familiar with 'honey'. For most of us, honey refers to the sweet liquid that is produced by the honey bee Apis mellifera as a form of stored energy. Bees make honey from the sugary nectar of flowers. In fact, honey is the partially-digested sugars from the nectar that are dried down to a thick syrup.

Chemically, honey is a syrup of fructose and glucose in a water base. Before extensive cultivation of sugarcane became commonplace, honey was the only commonly-available sweetener available to humanity. Because of its high sugar content and low moisture content honey is also essentially sterile. Neither bacteria nor fungi can grow in it. As such, honey was also used as a preservative. Once you dilute honey with water yeast can grow in the liquid so that you can ferment honey water to make a beer equivalent that's known as mead. Honey was an essential sweetener in Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman cookery.

Honey bees actually use a system of partial digestion to transform the complex sugars in plant nectars into honey. The worker bees collect nectar by siphoning it up into their stomachs. The stomach acids and enzymes called invertases act on the sugars to break them down into simple sugars.

Back in the hive, the bees regurgitate the nectar into the wax cells of the honeycomb. In fact, this only the first part of the process. The bees ingest and regurgitate the mixture a number of times. Each time, they break down the sugars a little further, dry them up a little more and make the mixture a little more acid. By the end, the pH of the final solution is about 3.5 and the majority of the sugars have been broken down into the simple sugars, fructose and glucose. The syrup is considerably more concentrated than it was at the beginning, but it is still not honey.

In fact, the bees allow the excess moisture to evaporate away naturally, concentrating the syrup down to honey. At the same time, the digestive enzymes still continue to work, converting more of the complex sugars to simple ones. The process continues as bees inside the hive fan their wings, creating a strong draft across the honeycomb, which enhances evaporation of much of the water from the nectar. This reduction in water content raises the sugar concentration and prevents fermentation. Ripe honey, as removed from the hive by a beekeeper, has a long shelf life, and will not ferment if properly sealed. Eventually, when the mixture has dried sufficiently and is now honey, the bees cap the cell to help preserve the honey even further.

It has recently been found that honey contains an enzyme, glucose oxidase. This slowly converts glucose to hydrogen peroxide (H₂O<sup>2), a very potent antibacterial and antifungal agent. However, the enzyme is only activated when honey is diluted and the pH increases.

Naturally, bees use honey as a food source in cold and damp weather, when they cannot fly out of the hive or when fresh food sources are scarce. Humans have been able to semi-domesticate bees and by contriving for bee swarms to nest in artificial hives so that it's possible to harvest excess honey.

The physical properties of honey vary, depending on water content, the type of flora used to produce it (pasturage), temperature, and the proportion of the specific sugars it contains. Fresh honey is a supersaturated liquid, containing more sugar than the water can typically dissolve at ambient temperatures. At room temperature, honey is a supercooled liquid, in which the glucose will precipitate into solid granules. This forms a semisolid solution of precipitated sugars in a solution of sugars and other ingredients. As with all nutritive sweeteners, honey is mostly sugars and contains only trace amounts of vitamins or minerals. Honey also contains tiny amounts of several compounds thought to function as antioxidants, including chrysin, pinobanksin, vitamin C, catalase, and pinocembrin.

The melting point of crystallized honey is between 40 and 50°C, depending on its composition. Below this temperature, honey can be either in a metastable state, meaning that it will not crystallize until a seed crystal is added, or, more often, it is in a "labile" state, being saturated with enough sugars to crystallize spontaneously. The rate of crystallization is affected by the ratio of the main sugars, fructose to glucose, as well as the dextrin content. Temperature also affects the rate of crystallization, which is fastest between 13 and 17°C. Below 5°C, the honey will not crystallize and, thus, the original texture and flavour can be preserved indefinitely. And, since honey normally exists below its melting point, it is a supercooled liquid. At very low temperatures, honey will not freeze solid. Instead, as the temperatures become colder, the viscosity of honey increases. Like most viscous liquids, the honey will become thick and sluggish with decreasing temperature. While appearing or even feeling solid, it will continue to flow at very slow rates.

The honey bee is a colonial insect that is often maintained, fed, and transported by beekeepers. Honey bees do not survive individually, but rather as part of the colony. Reproduction is also accomplished at the colony level. Colonies are often referred to as superorganisms.

Honey bees collect flower nectar and convert it to honey which is stored in their hives. The nectar is transported in the stomach of the bees, and is converted to honey through the addition of various digestive enzymes, and by being stored in a "honey cell" and then partially dehydrated. Nectar and honey provide the energy for the bees' flight muscles and for heating the hive during the winter period. Honey bees also collect pollen which supplies protein and fat for bee brood to grow. Centuries of selective breeding by humans have created honey bees that produce far more honey than the colony needs. Beekeepers, also known as "apiarists," harvest the honey.

Beekeepers often provide a place for the colony to live and to store honey. There are seven basic types of beehive: skeps, Langstroth hives, top-bar hives, box hives, log gums, D.E. hives and miller hives. All U.S. states require beekeepers to use movable frames to allow bee inspectors to check the brood for disease. This allows beekeepers to keep the Langstroth, top-bar, and D.E. hives freely, but other types of hives require special permitting, such as for museum use. The type of beehive used significantly impacts colony health and wax and honey production.

Modern hives also enable beekeepers to transport bees, moving from field to field as the crop needs pollinating and allowing the beekeeper to charge for the pollination services they provide. Collecting honey is typically achieved by using smoke from a bee smoker to pacify the bees; this causes the bees to attempt to save the resources of the hive from a possible forest fire, and makes them far less aggressive. The honeycomb is removed from the hive and the honey is extracted from that, often using a honey extractor. The honey is then filtered.

As honey is made from the nectar of plants, the flavour of that nectar is transferred to the honey, so that honey made from different plants have different flavour profiles. Most commercial honey is mixed, but you do get single varietal honey, like heather honey, acacia honey, orange blossom honey, clover honey etc.

The world's main honey producers are China, Turkey and the USA. Other major producers being the Ukraine, Argentina and Mexico.

Dangers of Honey

Though the nature of honey makes it essentially sterile, and because most microorganisms do not grow in honey because of its low water activity of 0.6 and low pH, it should still be noted that honey sometimes contains dormant endospores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which can be dangerous to infants, as the endospores can transform into toxin-producing bacteria in the infant's immature intestinal tract, leading to illness and even death.

Stomach acids in adults and older children effectively kill these dormant bacterial spores, but the stomach acids in babies are insufficiently strong to completely kill all the spores. Honey should not be given to babies under 1 year old.

As honey is made from the nectar of plants, the toxins in certain plants can be transferred to honey. Notable examples are honeys made from oleanders, rhododendrons, mountain laurels, sheep laurel, and azaleas and these lead to a syndrome known as 'Toxic Honey', the symptoms of which include dizziness, weakness, excessive perspiration, nausea, and vomiting. Less commonly, low blood pressure, shock, heart rhythm irregularities, and convulsions may occur, with rare cases resulting in death. As commercial honey is a mix from different sources, toxic honey syndrome is far more likely to result from using "natural" unprocessed honey and honey from farmers who may have a small number of hives.</sup>