"God's gift" and "Golden balsam", that's how people call honey since the ancient times. It is a food supplement, a medicine and it is used in cosmetics.
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Honey has been found preserved in Egyptian pyramids where it symbolized immortality, initiation and rebirth. In ancient Rome it was a food of scholars and prophets. It doesn't ever change its consistency and it is one of the most durable foods. Honey is a complex substance. It contains several types of simple sugars, proteins, amino acids, enzymes, organic acids, minerals and other valuable substances. It is also rich with vitamins especially those from B complex group.
Crystallization is the main characteristic of honey. They are numerous types of honey and each type has different time of crystallization. Acacia honey can stay liquid even three years, meadow honey will start to crystallize after 3-4 months, sunflower honey after twenty days while oilseed rape honey will start to crystallize in less than a week.
Also, each type of honey has its own characteristic smell, taste, colour and density. Dark honey is richer with minerals and has more illness fighting agents than light honey. But, regardless of the colour each and every honey is more than special if it satisfies two requirements: it must be completely naturally produced without supplements and cold processed. When those two requests are satisfied, then every honey is "golden balsam". For example, buckwheat honey helps blood vessels to strength; linden honey abets sweating while acacia honey has anti-inflammatory effects.
It has been found that bacteria cannot live in honey. It is known that if you want to preserve a piece of meat you should put it in honey and it will not degrade.
Thanks to the amount of microelements honey takes away water from bacteria, killing it that way. That's why bacteria which cause typhus die in honey in 48 hours; those who cause paratyphoid fever die in 24 hours while dysentery bacteria die in 10 hours. Microbes which cause bowel inflammation die after 48 hours and microbes that cause blood poisoning in case of conical bronchitis and pneumonia die after only 4 days.
Researchers showed that its antibiotic characteristics are highly dependable on the type of honey. Linden honey and forest honey act strongly on staphylococcus and chestnut honey on Escherichia coli. Honey's efficiency has been also proved against fungus and one cell organisms like amoeba.
Its real biological value honey has when it is used as food, prevention or a medicine along with other bee products: pollen, propolis, and royal jelly.