Earthly Delight Monday - Featuring Ingredients That Make Handmade Soap Special + How to Make Lavender Honey

 

Fun Trivia about Bees and Honey –

Honeybees

• There are 3 kinds of bees within the hive – Queen, Workers and Drones
• Honeybees fly at 15 mph
• Honeybees are the only insect that produces food for humans
• Honeybees are the only bees that die after they sting
• Honeybees are responsible for pollinating approx 80% of all fruit, vegetable and seed crops in the U.S.
• Bees communicate with each other by dancing and by using pheromones (scents).
• Honeybees never sleep!

Honey

• Honey is 80% sugars and 20% water.
• A single honeybee will only produce approximately 1/12 teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.
• A single honey bee will visit 50-100 flowers on a single trip out of the hive.
• Honey is the ONLY food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including water.
• A typical beehive can make up to 400 pounds of honey per year.
• Honey never spoils.
• Flowers and other blossoming plants have nectarines that produce sugary nectar. Worker bees suck up the nectar and water and store it in a special honey stomach. When the stomach is full the bee returns to the hive and puts the nectar in an empty honeycomb. Natural chemicals from the bee's head glands and the evaporation of the water from the nectar change the nectar into honey.
• Out of 20,000 species of bees, only 4 make honey. 

On a different note - Honey and Insomnia

I am going to try this and let you know how it works – I have been having random intermittent bouts of insomnia for a couple of years – so at the onset of the next bout I will try this to see how it goes.

Insomnia: Honey can help you sleep. Eating honey raises your blood sugar level slightly. This results in a controlled increase of insulin, which then causes the amino acid trytophan to enter your brain. The trytophan is converted into serotonin, which promotes relaxation. Finally, in the pineal gland, with the aid of darkness, the serotonin is converted into melatonin, a well know cure for sleeping disorders. Honey also contains the ideal 1:1 ratio of fructose to glucose making it a super food for glycogen storage. Sufficient glycogen storage is necessary for restful sleep. When your liver runs out of glycogen at night, your brain starts to trigger stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenalin to convert protein muscle into glucose.

I wonder who was brave enough to try honey that was 2,000 years old?

• Honey stored in air tight containers never spoils. Sealed honey vats found in King Tut's tomb still contained edible honey, despite over 2,000 years beneath the sands.

How to Make Herbal Honey with Lavender

Sources; Utah County Beekeepers Association, Fun Facts about Honey, Health and Honeybees