The honey bee- Apis

Binomial nomenclature Popular name Native range/origin

Apis dorsata Giant Honey bee Southeast Asia

Apis florae Dwarf Honey Bee Southeast Asia

Apis cerana Indian Honey Bee SE Asia to India

Apis mellifera European Honey Bee Europe, Middle East & Africa
Stingless bees, sometimes called stingless honey bees or simply meliponines, are a large group
of bees (approximately 500 species), comprising the tribe Meliponini (or subtribe Meliponina
according to other authors). They belong in the family Apidae, and are closely related to
common honey bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees and bumblebees. The common name is slightly
misleading, as a great many other bee species, especially in the family Andrenidae, are also
incapable of stinging, as are all male bees. Meliponines have stingers, but they are highly
reduced and cannot be used for defense.

Life Cycle: Honey bees are social insects. There are three castes of bees: queens, which produce
eggs; drones or males, which mate with the queen; and, workers, which are all non reproducing
females. The queen lays eggs singly in hexagonal cells of the comb. Larvae hatch from eggs in 3
to 4 days and are fed by worker bees and develop through several stages (instars) in the cells.
Cells are capped by worker bees when the larvae pupates. Queen and drones (that develop from
unfertilized eggs) are larger than workers and require enlarged cells to develop. Queens complete
development in 15 ½ days, drones in 24 days and workers in 21 days for larvae and pupae stages.
Only one queen is usually present in a hive. New queens develop in enlarged cells by differential
feeding by workers when the existing queen ages or dies or the colony becomes very large.
Virgin queens fly on a nuptial flight and are mated by drones from their own colony or other
colonies. Queens mate with several drones during the nuptial flight. New colonies are formed
when newly mated queens leave the colony with worker bees, a process called "swarming."
Swarms of bees are often noticed and sometimes cause concern until they find a suitable nesting
location. A queen may live three to five years; drones usually die before winter; and, workers
may live for a few months. A colony may typically consists of 20,000 to 90,000 individuals.

Habitat, Food Source(s), Damage: Complex mouthparts of adults can be used for chewing and
sucking. Larvae ingest liquids and have mouthparts reduced. Honey bee workers visit flowers to
collect pollen and nectar. During transport to the hive, pollen is held in a structure on each hind
leg called the "pollen basket" and nectar is carried in a structure in the front part of the digestive
system, called the "honey sac." They return to the hive, which may be provided by man or
located in a hollow tree, wall void, or some other sheltered habitat. Pollen is stored in the cells of
the comb within the hive. In other cells ("honeycombs"), nectar is converted into honey when the
bee regurgitates the nectar, adding an enzyme (invertase) that facilitates the conversion. Nectar
must also be concentrated by evaporation. Worker bees feed the larvae, drones, and queen. Wax
is produced between the segments of the worker bees’ body wall in small flakes. It is chewed and
reshaped to form honey comb. Worker bees communicate with other worker bees, conveying
information about the type of nearby nectar source, distance and direction from the hive using
"dances." They also regulate the temperature (thermoregulate) in the colony and collect water to
use as an evaporative coolant during hot time of the year. Worker bees are generally not
aggressive (defensive) during foraging or swarming activities. However, when the hive contains
developing larvae and pupae, they (particularly Africanized honey bees) will aggressively attack
intruders to defend their colony. They also communicate with sound, queen pheromone and
alarm pheromone.

Pest Status: Mostly considered beneficial because they pollinate many fruits, vegetables and
ornamental flowers; they produce honey, beeswax, pollen and royal jelly; adult bees can sting,
making them a nuisance to man and animals. They are a hazard only to sensitive individuals.
Recently the Africanized honey bee (sometimes called the "killer bee"), a race (some consider
it a subspecies) of honey bees has entered Texas; their stings are no more potent that stings of
"domesticated" commercially-produced and kept European honey bees, which were originally
introduced into North America by early European settlers; the Africanized honey bees also tend
to be more aggressive in defending their hives and thus are more inclined to sting in mass.
Historically in Texas, an average of one human per year dies from insect stings.

When worker honey bees sting they leave the barbed stinger in the skin with the poison sac still
attached. Each bee can only sting once, and this is fatal for the bee. Stings should be removed
promptly to prevent injection of additional venom. Scrape the sting and poison sac away with a
knife or fingernail in such a way as to avoid slapping or pinching the poison sac because this will
inject additional poison into the skin.

Types of bee hives

Fixed comb hives

A fixed comb hive is a hive in which the combs cannot be removed or manipulated for
management or harvesting without permanently damaging the comb. Almost any hollow
structure can be used for this purpose, such as a log gum, skep or a clay pot. Fixed comb hives
are no longer in common use in industrialised countries, and are illegal in some places that
require inspection for problems such as varroa and American foulbrood. In many developing
countries fixed comb hives are widely used and because they can be made from any locally
available material are very inexpensive and appropriate.

Movable frame hives

The langstroth hive is on the other hand a very modern hive for effective beekeeping. The
Langstroth was the first successful top-opened hive with movable frames, and other designs of
hive have been based on it.

Top-bar hives

A growing number of amateur beekeepers are adopting various top-bar hives similar to the type
commonly found in Africa. Top bar hives were originally used as traditional beekeeping a
method in both Greece and Vietnam. These have no frames and the honey-filled comb is not
returned to the hive after extraction, as it is in the Langstroth hive. Because of this, the
production of honey is likely to be somewhat less than that of a Langstroth hive. Top bar hives
are mostly kept by people who are more interested in having bees in their garden than in honey
production per se. Some of the most well known top-bar hives are the Kenyan Top Bar Hive
(KTBH) with sloping sides, the Tanzanian Top Bar Hive, which has straight sides and the
Vertical Top Bar Hives such as the Warre or "People's Hive" designed by Abbe Warre in the mid
1900s.

Protective clothing

Beekeepers often wear protective clothing to protect themselves from stings

While knowledge of the bees is the first line of defense, most beekeepers also wear some
protective clothing. Novice beekeepers usually wear gloves and a hooded suit or hat and veil.
Experienced beekeepers sometimes elect not to use gloves because they inhibit delicate
manipulations. The face and neck are the most important areas to protect, so most beekeepers
wear at least a veil.

The protective clothing is generally light colored (but not colorful) and of a smooth material.
This provides the maximum differentiation from the colony's natural predators (bears, skunks,
etc.), which tend to be dark-colored and furry.

Smoker

Main article: Bee smoker

Bee smoker with heat shield and hook

Smoke is the beekeeper's third line of defense. Most beekeepers use a "smoker" — a device
designed to generate smoke from the incomplete combustion of various fuels. Smoke calms bees;
it initiates a feeding response in anticipation of possible hive abandonment due to fire. Smoke
also masks alarm pheromones released by guard bees or when bees are squashed in an
inspection. The ensuing confusion creates an opportunity for the beekeeper to open the hive and
work without triggering a defensive reaction. In addition, when a bee consumes honey the bee's
abdomen distends, supposedly making it difficult to make the necessary flexes to sting, though
this has not been tested scientifically.

Smoke is of questionable use with a swarm, because swarms do not have honey stores to feed on
in response. Usually smoke is not needed, since swarms tend to be less defensive, as they have
no stores to defend, and a fresh swarm has fed well from the hive.

Many types of fuel can be used in a smoker as long as it is natural and not contaminated with
harmful substances. These fuels include hessian, twine, burlap, pine needles, corrugated
cardboard, and mostly rotten or punky wood..

Some beekeepers are using "liquid smoke" as a safer, more convenient, alternative. It is a water-
based solution that is sprayed onto the bees from a plastic spray bottle.
Torpor may also be induced by the introduction of chilled air into the hive - while chilled carbon
dioxide may have harmful long-term effects.[18]

Effects of stings and of protective measures

Some beekeepers believe that the more stings a beekeeper receives, the less irritation each
causes, and they consider it important for safety of the beekeeper to be stung a few times a
season. Beekeepers have high levels of antibodies (mainly IgG) reacting to the major antigen of
bee venom, phospholipase A2 (PLA).[19] Antibodies correlate with the frequency of bee stings.

The entry of venom into the body from bee-stings may also be hindered and reduced by
protective clothing that allows the wearer to remove stings and venom sacs with a simple tug on
the clothing. Although the stinger is barbed, a worker bee is less likely to become lodged into
clothing than human skin.

Natural beekeeping

There is a current movement that eschews chemicals in beekeeping and believes that health
issues in bees can most effectively be addressed by reversing trends that disrespect the needs of
the bees themselves. Crop spraying, unnatural conditions in which bees are moved thousands of
miles to pollinate commercial crops, frequent opening of the hive for inspection, artificial
insemination of queens, routine medication and sugar water feeding are all thought to contribute
to a general weakening of the constitution of the honey bee.

Urban or backyard beekeeping

Main article: urban beekeeping
Related to natural beekeeping, urban beekeeping is an attempt to revert to a less industrialized
way of obtaining honey by utilizing small-scale colonies that pollinate urban gardens. Urban
apiculture has undergone a renaissance in the first decade of the 21st century), and urban
beekeeping is seen by many as a growing trend; it has recently been legalized in cities where it
was previously banned. Paris, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Melbourne and Washington DC, are
among beekeeping cities.

Bee colonies
Castes

A colony of bees consists of three castes of bee:

 a queen bee, which is normally the only breeding female in the colony;
 a large number of female worker bees, typically 30,000–50,000 in number;
 a number of male drones, ranging from thousands in a strong hive in spring to very few
during dearth or cold season.
The queen is the only sexually mature female in the hive and all of the female worker bees and
male drones are her offspring. The queen may live for up to three years or more and may be
capable of laying half a million eggs or more in her lifetime. At the peak of the breeding season,
late spring to summer, a good queen may be capable of laying 3,000 eggs in one day, more than
her own body weight. This would be exceptional however; a prolific queen might peak at 2,000
eggs a day, but a more average queen might lay just 1,500 eggs per day. The queen is raised from
a normal worker egg, but is fed a larger amount of royal jelly than a normal worker bee, resulting
in a radically different growth and metamorphosis. The queen influences the colony by the
production and dissemination of a variety of pheromones or "queen substances". One of these
chemicals suppresses the development of ovaries in all the female worker bees in the hive and
prevents them from laying eggs.

Mating of queens

The queen emerges from her cell after 15 days of development and she remains in the hive for 3–
7 days before venturing out on a mating flight. Mating flight is otherwise known as 'nuptial
flight'. Her first orientation flight may only last a few seconds, just enough to mark the position
of the hive. Subsequent mating flights may last from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, and she may mate
with a number of male drones on each flight. Over several matings, possibly a dozen or more, the
queen receives and stores enough sperm from a succession of drones to fertilize hundreds of
thousands of eggs. If she does not manage to leave the hive to mate—possibly due to bad
weather or being trapped in part of the hive—she remains infertile and become a drone layer,
incapable of producing female worker bees. Worker bees sometimes kill a non-performing queen
and produce another. Without a properly performing queen, the hive is doomed.

Mating takes place at some distance from the hive and often several hundred feet in the air; it is
thought that this separates the strongest drones from the weaker ones, ensuring that only the
fastest and strongest drones get to pass on their genes.

Female worker bees

Bee
Almost all the bees in a hive are female worker bees. At the height of summer when activity in
the hive is frantic and work goes on non-stop, the life of a worker bee may be as short as 6
weeks; in late autumn, when no brood is being raised and no nectar is being harvested, a young
bee may live for 16 weeks, right through the winter. During its life a worker bee performs
different work functions in the hive, largely dictated by the age of the bee.

Period Work activity

Days 1-3 Cleaning cells and incubation
Day 3-6 Feeding older larvae
Day 6-10 Feeding younger larvae
Day 8-16 Receiving honey and pollen from field bees
Day 12-18 Wax making and cell building
Day 14 onwards Entrance guards; nectar and pollen foraging
Male bees (drones)
Drones are the largest bees in the hive (except for the queen), at almost twice the size of a worker
bee. They do not work, do not forage for pollen or nectar and have no other known function than
to mate with new queens and fertilize them on their mating flights. A bee colony generally starts
to raise drones a few weeks before building queen cells so they can supersede a failing queen or
prepare for swarming. When queen-raising for the season is over, bees in colder climates drive
drones out of the hive to die, biting and tearing their legs and wings.

Differing stages of development

Stage of
Queen Worker Drone
development
Egg 3 days 3 days 3 days
13 days :Successive moults occur within this period 8 to
Larva 8 days 10 days
13 day period
Pupa 4 days 8 days 8 days
Total 15 days 21 days 24 days
Structure of a bee colony

A domesticated bee colony is normally housed in a rectangular hive body, within which eight to
ten parallel frames house the vertical plates of honeycomb that contain the eggs, larvae, pupae
and food for the colony. If one were to cut a vertical cross-section through the hive from side to
side, the brood nest would appear as a roughly ovoid ball spanning 5-8 frames of comb. The two
outside combs at each side of the hive tend to be exclusively used for long-term storage of honey
and pollen.

Within the central brood nest, a single frame of comb typically has a central disk of eggs, larvae
and sealed brood cells that may extend almost to the edges of the frame. Immediately above the
brood patch an arch of pollen-filled cells extends from side to side, and above that again a
broader arch of honey-filled cells extends to the frame tops. The pollen is protein-rich food for
developing larvae, while honey is also food but largely energy rich rather than protein rich. The
nurse bees that care for the developing brood secrete a special food called 'royal jelly' after
feeding themselves on honey and pollen. The amount of royal jelly fed to a larva determines
whether it develops into a worker bee or a queen.

Annual cycle of a bee colony

The development of a bee colony follows an annual cycle of growth that begins in spring with a
rapid expansion of the brood nest, as soon as pollen is available for feeding larvae. Some
production of brood may begin as early as January, even in a cold winter, but breeding
accelerates towards a peak in May (in the northern hemisphere), producing an abundance of
harvesting bees synchronized to the main nectar flow in that region. Each race of bees times this
build-up slightly differently, depending on how the flora of its original region blooms. Some
regions of Europe have two nectar flows: one in late spring and another in late August. Other
regions have only a single nectar flow. The skill of the beekeeper lies in predicting when the
nectar flow will occur in his area and in trying to ensure that his colonies achieve a maximum
population of harvesters at exactly the right time.

Formation of new coloniesColony reproduction: swarming and supersedure

Main article: Swarming (honey bee)

A swarm about to land

All colonies are totally dependent on their queen, who is the only egg-layer. However, even the
best queens live only a few years and one or two years longevity is the norm. She can choose
whether or not to fertilize an egg as she lays it; if she does so, it develops into a female worker
bee; if she lays an unfertilized egg it becomes a male drone. She decides which type of egg to lay
depending on the size of the open brood cell she encounters on the comb. In a small worker cell,
she lays a fertilized egg; if she finds a larger drone cell, she lays an unfertilized drone egg.

All the time that the queen is fertile and laying eggs she produces a variety of pheromones,
which control the behavior of the bees in the hive. These are commonly called queen substance,
but there are various pheromones with different functions. As the queen ages, she begins to run
out of stored sperm, and her pheromones begin to fail. Inevitably, the queen begins to falter, and
the bees decide to replace her by creating a new queen from one of her worker eggs. They may
do this because she has been damaged (lost a leg or an antenna), because she has run out of
sperm and cannot lay fertilized eggs (has become a 'drone laying queen'), or because her
pheromones have dwindled to where they cannot control all the bees in the hive.

At this juncture, the bees produce one or more queen cells by modifying existing worker cells
that contain a normal female egg. However, the bees pursue two distinct behaviors:

In swarming, a great many queen cells are created typically a dozen or more and these are
located around the edges of a broodcomb, most often at the sides and the bottom.

New wax combs between basement joists

Once either process has begun, the old queen normally leaves the hive with the hatching of the
first queen cells. She leaves accompanied by a large number of bees, predominantly young bees
(wax-secretors), who form the basis of the new hive. Scouts are sent out from the swarm to find
suitable hollow trees or rock crevices. As soon as one is found, the entire swarm moves in.
Within a matter of hours, they build new wax brood combs, using honey stores that the young
bees have filled themselves with before leaving the old hive. Only young bees can secrete wax
from special abdominal segments, and this is why swarms tend to contain more young bees.
Often a number of virgin queens accompany the first swarm (the 'prime swarm'), and the old
queen is replaced as soon as a daughter queen mates and begins laying. Otherwise, she is quickly
superseded in the new home.
Factors that trigger swarming: It is generally accepted that a colony of bees does not
swarm until they have completed all of their brood combs, i.e., filled all available space with
eggs, larvae, and brood. This generally occurs in late spring at a time when the other areas of the
hive are rapidly filling with honey stores. One key trigger of the swarming instinct is when the
queen has no more room to lay eggs and the hive population is becoming very congested. Under
these conditions, a prime swarm may issue with the queen, resulting in a halving of the
population within the hive, leaving the old colony with a large number of hatching bees. The
queen who leaves finds herself in a new hive with no eggs and no larvae but lots of energetic
young bees who create a new set of brood combs from scratch in a very short time.

Another important factor in swarming is the age of the queen. Those under a year in age are
unlikely to swarm unless they are extremely crowded, while older queens have swarming
predisposition.

Beekeepers monitor their colonies carefully in spring and watch for the appearance of queen
cells, which are a dramatic signal that the colony is determined to swarm.

When a colony has decided to swarm, queen cells are produced in numbers varying to a dozen or
more. When the first of these queen cells is sealed after eight days of larval feeding, a virgin
queen pupates and is due to emerge seven days later. Before leaving, the worker bees fill their
stomachs with honey in preparation for the creation of new honeycombs in a new home. This
cargo of honey also makes swarming bees less inclined to sting. A newly issued swarm is
noticeably gentle for up to 24 hours and is often capable of being handled by a beekeeper
without gloves or veil.

A swarm attached to a branch

This swarm looks for shelter. A beekeeper may capture it and introduce it into a new hive,
helping meet this need. Otherwise, it returns to a feral state, in which case it finds shelter in a
hollow tree, excavation, abandoned chimney, or even behind shutters.

Back at the original hive, the first virgin queen to emerge from her cell immediately seeks to kill
all her rival queens still waiting to emerge. Usually, however, the bees deliberately prevent her
from doing this, in which case, she too leads a second swarm from the hive. Successive swarms
are called 'after-swarms' or 'casts' and can be very small, often with just a thousand or so bees—
as opposed to a prime swarm, which may contain as many as ten to twenty-thousand bees.

A small after-swarm has less chance of survival and may threaten the original hive's survival by
depleting it. When a hive swarms despite the beekeeper's preventative efforts, a good
management practice is to give the depleted hive a couple frames of open brood with eggs. This
helps replenish the hive more quickly and gives a second opportunity to raise a queen if there is a
mating failure.

Each race or sub-species of honey bee has its own swarming characteristics. Italian bees are very
prolific and inclined to swarm; Northern European black bees have a strong tendency to
supersede their old queen without swarming. These differences are the result of differing
evolutionary pressures in the regions where each sub-species evolved.

Artificial swarming

When a colony accidentally loses its queen, it is said to be 'queenless'. The workers realize that
the queen is absent after as little as an hour, as her pheromones fade in the hive. The colony
cannot survive without a fertile queen laying eggs to renew the population. So the workers select
cells containing eggs aged less than three days and enlarge these cells dramatically to form
'emergency queen cells'. These appear similar to large peanut-like structures about an inch long
that hang from the center or side of the brood combs. The developing larva in a queen cell is fed
differently from an ordinary worker-bee; in addition to the normal honey and pollen, she receives
a great deal of royal jelly, a special food secreted by young 'nurse bees' from the hypopharyngeal
gland. This special food dramatically alters the growth and development of the larva so that, after
metamorphosis and pupation, it emerges from the cell as a queen bee. The queen is the only bee
in a colony which has fully developed ovaries, and she secretes a pheromone which suppresses
the normal development of ovaries in all her workers.

HOW to harvest? This seems to puzzle most hobbyists, and they do all kinds of foolish things that causes
STINGING.

First principle is "harvest when MOST bees are AWAY from the hive OUT FORAGING, which would be a
nice sunny warm day between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM, NOT AFTER YOU GET HOME FROM WORK!

Second, no matter what system you use, NEVER leave honey EXPOSED that will probably cause
ROBBING, meaning keep all honey somehow COVERED up as much as possible.

Third, you WANT essentially NO bees on your frames to "take home". This REMOVAL of bees from
frames of honey can be done in 4 ways; of which causes stinging, no stings, no loss of bees, and fast.

Using a Bee Brush is definitely the most popular method of cleaning bees from frames of honey by
beginners and hobbyists; and EQUALLY the system that causes the most stings to the beekeeper, and
ALL THE NEIGHBORS ON THE BLOCK which just INVITES a legal confrontation.

1) Bees DON'T put a capping on a cell until that honey RIPENED. Hence, you should never extract a
frame of honey unless it is about 95% CAPPED. If you are careless or greedy and extract frames with lots
of UNcapped cells, your entire crop might FERMENT by having NON-ripened honey in it. Even if you luck
out, and your honey does not ferment, who wants thin, watery honey that is supposed to be thick and
heavy?
2) Honey is very HYGROSCOPIC, meaning that ABSORBS moisture out of the air. SO WHAT, some might
say? Bees, instructed genetically by GOD, evaporate the water from the nectar they have collected until
they get the percentage water down to 160/0-18% before they CAP the cell. UNCAPPED honey with a
water content exceeding "about" 19% tends to ferment and spoil. Since honey is hygroscopic and likes
to absorb moisture from our humid summer air, when extracting and, before bottling, KEEP YOUR
HONEY COVERED as much as possible to protect it from humid air. Put a top on an open pail of honey,
put a raincoat or a plastic tablecloth over your extractor that has honey left in it, put a cap on a bottle of
honey immediately after filling the bottle rather than letting the bottle stand open for several hours,
and, if possible, do your extraction, settling, and bottling in a room with a DE-humidifier.

3) Would you like a gift of some delicate, beautiful thing if it came wrapped in DIRTY paper or old
newspaper? What would be your impression of the GIVER? Man has never been able to synthesize
honey (thank God), and honey perhaps is the purest product on earth. Don't defile it, or identify your
cheapness in gift giving, by putting YOUR special, locally produced, high-grade honey in some old
washed out peanut butter jar,a Mason jar better known for bootleg "white lightning", or some old
ketchup bottle that honey pours from BADLY.. And, in your conceit, don't you want the gifted party to
know exactly who was the "giver"? Put a fancy LABEL on your jar, giving the net weight of honey, but
more important YOUR NAME and TELEPHONE NUMBER so they might call for more and tell neighbors.
DON'T HIDE UNDER A BUSHEL, I was told as a child. 1 am PROUD of my honey, and my prize ribbons
from FAIRS prove it; and that makes me very happy to be part of mankind. WHY DON'T YOU TRY IT T00?

Collecting honey
Honey is collected from wild bee colonies, or from domesticated beehives. Wild bee nests are
sometimes located by following a honeyguide bird.

Collecting honey is typically achieved by using smoke from a bee smoker to pacify the bees; this
causes the bees to attempt to save the resources of the hive from a possible forest fire, and makes
them far less aggressive. The honeycomb is removed from the hive and the honey is extracted
from that, often using a honey extractor. The honey is then filtered.

Modern uses
As a food and in cooking

The main uses of honey are in cooking, baking, as a spread on bread, and as an addition to
various beverages, such as tea, and as a sweetener in some commercial beverages. According to
the The National Honey Board (a USDA-overseen organization), "honey stipulates a pure
product that does not allow for the addition of any other substance...this includes, but is not
limited to, water or other sweeteners".[38] Honey barbecue and honey mustard are common and
popular sauce flavors.

Honey is the main ingredient in the alcoholic beverage mead, which is also known as "honey
wine" or "honey beer". Historically, the ferment for mead was honey's naturally occurring yeast.
Honey is also used as an adjunct in some beers.
Honey wine, or mead, is typically (modern era) made with a honey and water mixture with a
pack of yeast added for fermentation. Primary fermentation usually takes 40 days, after which
the must needs to be racked into a secondary fermentation vessel and left to sit about 35–40 more
days. If done properly, fermentation will be finished by this point (though if a sparkling mead is
desired, fermentation can be restarted after bottling by the addition of a small amount of sugar),
but most meads require aging for 6–9 months or more in order to be palatable.

Preservation
Because of the unique composition and chemical properties of honey, it is suitable for long-term
storage, and is easily assimilated even after long preservation. Honey, and objects immersed in honey,
have been preserved for decades and even centuries. [61][62]

Honey is very HYGROSCOPIC, meaning that ABSORBS moisture out of the air. The key to preservation is
limiting access to humidity. In its cured state, honey has a sufficiently high sugar content to inhibit
fermentation. If exposed to moist air, its hydrophilic properties will pull moisture into the honey,
eventually diluting it to the point that fermentation can begin. Honey sealed in honeycomb cells by the
bees is considered by many to be the ideal form for preservation. [citation needed]

Honey should also be protected from oxidation and temperature degradation. It generally should
not be preserved in metal containers because the acids in the honey may promote oxidation of the
vessel. Traditionally, honey was stored in ceramic or wooden containers; however, glass and
plastic are now the favored materials. Honey stored in wooden containers may be discolored or
take on flavors imparted from the vessel. Likewise, honey stored uncovered near other foods
may absorb other smells.[citation needed]

Excessive heat can have detrimental effects on the nutritional value of honey. Heating up to 37
°C (99 °F) causes loss of nearly 200 components, some of which are antibacterial. Heating up to
40 °C (104 °F) destroys invertase, an important enzyme. At 50 °C (122 °F), the honey sugars
caramelize. Generally, any large temperature fluctuation causes decay.[citation needed]

Regardless of preservation, honey may crystallize over time. Crystallization does not affect the
flavor, quality or nutritional content of the honey, though it does affect color and texture. The
rate is a function of storage temperature, availability of "seed" crystals and the specific mix of
sugars and trace compounds in the honey. Tupelo and acacia honeys, for example, are
exceptionally slow to crystallize, while goldenrod will often crystallize still in the comb. Most
honeys crystallize fastest between about 50 and 70 °F (10 and 21 °C). The crystals can be
dissolved by heating the honey.

In medicine
Historically, honey has been used by humans to treat a variety of ailments, from gastric
disturbances to ulcers, wounds and burns, through ingestion or topical application, but only
recently have the antiseptic and antibacterial properties of honey been chemically explained.
Different honeys have different properties, which was known since ancient times. Much
scientific research has been done, with emphasis of late on fighting infections in wounds.[68] The
antibacterial mechanisms known to date are H2O2, methylglyoxal(MGO), bee defensin-1, the
osmotic effect and the pH.[69]

Use for diabetic ulcers

Topical honey has been used successfully in a comprehensive treatment of diabetic ulcers when
the patient cannot use topical antibiotics

Acidity

The pH of honey is commonly between 3.2 and 4.5.[72] This relatively acidic pH level prevents
the growth of many bacteria.