Honey is a sweet, viscous food substance made by honey bees and some other bees. Bees produce honey from the sugary secretions of plants (floral nectar) or from secretions of other insects (such as honeydew), by regurgitation, enzymatic activity, and water evaporation. Honey bees store honey in wax structures called honeycombs, whereas stingless bees store honey in pots made of wax and resin. The variety of honey produced by honey bees (the genus Apis) is the best-known, due to its worldwide commercial production and human consumption. Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from hives of domesticated bees, a practice known as beekeeping or apiculture (meliponiculture in the case of stingless bees).
Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, and has about the same relative sweetness as sucrose (table sugar). Fifteen millilitres (1 US tablespoon) of honey provides around 190 kilojoules (46 kilocalories) of food energy. It has attractive chemical properties for baking and a distinctive flavor when used as a sweetener. Most microorganisms do not grow in honey, so sealed honey does not spoil, even after thousands of years.
Honey use and production have a long and varied history as an ancient activity. Several cave paintings in Cuevas de la Araña in Spain depict humans foraging for honey at least 8,000 years ago. Large-scale meliponiculture has been practiced by the Mayans since pre-Columbian times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey
Cayce
"As for the diet, let those be little of sweets, save as would be found in honey and honeycomb of the better nature. That is, as that produced by sweet clover, buckwheat, or such natures." [Cayce 85-1]
Scientists finally identified the specific molecule in honey responsible for its extraordinary preservation properties — a compound called defensin-1 produced by bees that prevents microbial growth and actively blocks bacteria from developing resistance.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen systematically tested every known honey component in isolation, finding that defensin-1 — a protein bees add during honey production from their own immune system — maintains antimicrobial potency indefinitely without degrading, even in 3,000-year-old honey from Egyptian tombs. Defensin-1 attacks the ribosomal RNA system bacteria use to produce proteins — a target so fundamental that no mutation can eliminate it without killing the bacterium itself.
This explains why honey has been effective in wound care across 4,000 years of human history without bacteria ever developing resistance. Pharmaceutical researchers are synthesizing concentrated defensin-1 for testing as a topical treatment for antibiotic-resistant wound infections, with clinical trials beginning in 2026.
Source: University of Copenhagen Department of Pharmacy, Danish National Research Foundation, Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2025
See Also
asphalt
beeswax
fat
fat-concentrate
fat-concentration
fat-formation
fatty acid
Fatty matter
fatty substance
fatty-matter
lipid
Lard or Tallow
Queen Bee
tar
wax
worm-fat