From The Backyard
Secrets of honey
Honeybees are the main collector of honey. The most accurate architecture of Nature can be seen in a beehive. The wax in hives is produced by the glands on the underside of a bee's body. They use the hive as their abode and most of the compartments are stocked with honey. In each hive there is only one queen-bee and she can lay as many as thousand eggs in one day. There are several drones or male bees in each hive. Their only function is to serve as mates for queens. The drones usually die soon after mating. The female worker bees keep the hive clean, nurse the newly hatched eggs and collect nectar and pollen from flowers. The interesting thing is that the bees have two stomachs, one is for collecting honey and the other is for digestion. After collecting the nectar the worker-bee passes the nectar from its honey-stomach to another worker's honey-stomach. This act is repeated several times. It helps to the change of nectar into honey. Nectar is a sweet juice of flower that bees change into honey. The honey so produced is then placed in the compartments of the beehive. Honey is collected by rural people (locally known as Bawaly) from the Sundarbans forest area. But freshly collected honey remains contaminated with various filthy matters like dirt, wax and excess of water content, which dilute the quality of honey. Scientists of the 'Carbohydrate Section' of the Bangladesh Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (BCSIR) laboratories have developed a process to store and preserve the honey collected from the Sundarbans for at least one year and a half without affecting its quality. Honey is a highly nutritive and energetic substance. It is considered to be the precious gift of nature. Different kinds of sugar such as glucose and fructose as well as a small amount of sucrose constitute the main nutrients of honey. Scientists observed that in addition to these nutrients various types of enzymes, vitamins, minerals, proteins and amino acids are also present in the honey. Scientists also observed that storing honey for a longtime might lead to the formation of some toxic materials such as Hydroxy methyl furfural (H.M.F.) etc., which may be fatal for health.
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