Facts About Honey

Properly sealed honey essentially never spoils — archaeologists have found pots of honey in ancient Egyptian tombs, roughly 3,000 years old, that were still edible.

Honey resists spoiling because it is low in moisture, naturally acidic, and produces small amounts of hydrogen peroxide — a hostile environment for bacteria.

To make one pound of honey, a colony's bees collectively visit around two million flowers and fly a combined distance often estimated at 55,000 miles.

A single worker bee produces only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime.

Honeybees tell each other where the best flowers are with the 'waggle dance' — a discovery that helped win Karl von Frisch a Nobel Prize in 1973.

Honey is a supersaturated sugar solution, mostly fructose and glucose, with only about 17 percent water.

Crystallized honey has not gone bad — gentle warming in a water bath returns it to liquid, and some honeys are deliberately sold creamed/crystallized.

Honey's color and flavor depend on the flowers the nectar came from, ranging from pale clover honey to dark, malty buckwheat honey.

Medical-grade honey (notably manuka) is used in modern wound dressings for its antibacterial properties.

Honey should never be given to babies under 12 months old because it can contain spores that cause infant botulism.

Mead — made by fermenting honey with water — is one of the oldest known alcoholic drinks, with evidence stretching back thousands of years.

Bears really do raid beehives, but they're after protein-rich larvae as much as the honey itself.

Honey has been used as a sweetener, medicine, and preservative across cultures for millennia — cave paintings in Spain show humans gathering honey around 8,000 years ago.