Di Giacomo Mario Menegola
Honey. Honey is one of the most ancient products of animal husbandry, so ancient it was spread worldwide even before writing was invented. It’s been used for millennia as the main sweetening substance almost everywhere, until the process of sugar production was invented in the Middle Ages.
Honey is naturally produced by bees, mainly of the apis mellifera species, which have been bred by humans for thousands of years to get more and more honey and other bee products, such as beeswax and royal jelly.
It all starts with bees collecting nectar to bring to the hive. Nectar is then transformed into honey, which is stored in combs as food reserve. In ancient times, when bees weren’t bred, gatherers would search for hives and collect combs: that was a dangerous process as there was the danger of being attacked by the bees, so breeding started, and then artificial hives were invented and improved to the form they have nowadays.
The process of honey making then continues with the collection of honeycombs, which are separated from their wax covering and can be sold directly as honeycombs, but honey usually gets extracted from combs and sold in jars or other containers in its fluid form. Even if in Nature honey is stored as a food reserve, today, as a result of the many-millennium-long breeding process, bees produce so much honey that, if noone collected it, much would go to waste, so honeycomb collection isn’t harmful to the bees.
Honey is appreciated worldwide for its sweetness and its organoleptic properties and it’s also used as the main ingredient in the production of mead, an alcoholic beverage almost as old as bee breeding and probably older than beer and wine.
Because of honey bees, hives and combs have become a symbol of wealth and well being in many cultures all around the world and are still considered as such by many.
