Sweetness and Light

 We could all do with some of the above in our lives, as another difficult year comes to an end, and whether you’re a honey-lover or not, it’s sometimes surprising to realise how intertwined human society is with bees and honey. The Egyptians in 3000BC adopted the bee as a sign of mankind’s ingenuity, a symbol of power, industry and production, and Cleopatra is said to have used honey as part of her beauty routine. Bees are reputed to have settled on the lips of Plato, indicating his future brilliance with words, and similarly, a swarm of bees is said to have gathered on baby Ambrose’s face, leaving behind a drop of honey. Ambrose became a bishop in fourth-century Milan who encouraged monks to use the bees’ chaste hard-working life as a model for their own.

Bees and honey have been part of music, poetry (many of us can recite the first verse of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ by Edward Lear!), architecture, art, philosophy, politics and religion for thousands of years, so it’s no wonder these days we have such an affinity with them. We used honey long before sugar, in ceremonies and celebrations, for healing and for mead. The idea of honey now has the sweetest of associations, its flavours evoking thoughts of summer days and the sound of bees buzzing between flowers in the sunshine.  AA Milne was on to something when he created the best known honey-lover in fiction, Winnie-the-Pooh. Thankfully, nowadays, we have safer, more efficient ways of harvesting honey; I don’t fancy just sticking my paw into a hive and scooping out what I can!

Ripe honey has a moisture content of around 18%; this is nectar that has been collected, stored, treated and capped with wax by the bees as winter food. This enables the colony to survive until the spring when the worker bees can forage again for fresh supplies of nectar and pollen. You may have noticed that there are different types of honey for sale; what makes this difference? Honey varies in colour from very pale gold to dark brown-black, and this is determined by the nectar collected by the bees. Darker honeys tend to contain more minerals and have a stronger more robust taste than lighter ones. Some honeys crystallise more quickly than others and this depends on the amount of fructose versus glucose in the nectar. Acacia honey, for example, will stay liquid whereas oil seed rape honey will crystallise quickly due to its higher proportion of glucose.

2021 has been “une année noire” for commercial honey producers across France, according to UNAAF, the beekeepers’ union, meaning that honey harvests have been exceptionally poor due to the prolonged wet spring experienced across the country. Many beekeepers have had to feed their colonies with sugar syrup much earlier in the season than usual, and several (us included) have decided to take no harvest and leave the honey that has been stored, for the bees. This means that honey might well be more expensive over the coming months as it is in short supply, but if you see any beekeepers selling honey at markets, please buy a pot to support them!