Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay
Hunter gatherer peoples ate honey. The Hadza people, in what is now Tanzania, get ~15% of their calories from honey *. This means that honey is and was a major part of their diet. Our great ape cousins forage for wild honey but much less than hunter gatherers. It seems likely that honey and honey larvae gathering and consumption, amongst many other things, made us who we are as a species.
Honey has a quite extraordinary number of positive nutritional properties **
“One established nootropic property about honey is that it assists the building and development of the entire central nervous system, particularly among newborn babies and preschool age children, which leads to the improvement of memory and growth, a reduction of anxiety, and the enhancement of intellectual performance later in life”
“honey consumption ameliorates the defense mechanism against oxidative stress and attenuated free radical-mediated molecular destruction”
“honey is a functional food that possesses anxiolytic, antinociceptive, anticonvulsant, and antidepressant effects”
“neuroprotective effect of the polyphenols present in honey involves several important activities within the brain. These effects include protection against oxidative challenge; the attenuation of neuroinflammation; the promotion of memory, learning, and cognitive function; and protection against neurotoxin-induced neuronal injury.”
“honey has gastroprotective, hepatoprotective, reproductive, hypoglycemic, antioxidant, antihypertensive, antibacterial, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, wound healing, cardio-protective and antitumor effects”
So we have been eating honey, and bee larvae, for tens of thousands of years if not hundreds of thousands and it’s very good for us.
Intensive agriculture is based principally on monocultures, big fields with only one crop like wheat, corn or rapeseed. Bees, like us, have a microbiome. Social bees like honey bees have a shared microbiome as they feed on a shared food resource.
If a person doesn’t eat a good diversity of different foods their microbiome won’t be very diverse either. The same is true of bees, when they range over monoculture fields it is difficult for them to get the diet diversity they need.
The lack of diversity in the bee microbiome means the bees have less resistance to disease and pest attack when compared to bees with access to a diverse diet.***
Monocultures, in intensive agricultural systems, are maintained by the use of NPK and a range of herbicides, pesticides etc. “For example, under conditions of chronic exposure, honey bee larvae fed on pollen contaminated with chlorpyrifos produced very few queens”.
So, habitat loss, monoculture crop fields, the use of synthetic chemicals plus a few other things are causing the massive bee colony losses that we see worldwide.
Is this a problem ?
For the food industry it is a bit but it’s also an opportunity. A study was done in Australia, 28 samples of honey were collected from supermarkets across the continent. 12 out of 28 were not pure honey. Another study showed that of 95 commercial honeys 27% were of “questionable authenticity”.
The honey is cut with rice, cane or corn syrups. Yes this has been happening since the 19704s but it is getting worse and more and more commercial honey is adulterated.
We, as consumers of products that have a long logistical chain behind them, are very subject to the old caveat emptor principle, product information asymmetry. The producer and the food industry know much much more about how their foodstuffs are produced than we do as we browse a supermarket.
All this is another reason to ask ourselves why we still have moncultures rather than sophisticated polycultures such as agroforestry systems. Why are we still using pesticides and other synthetic chemicals rather than using integrated ecological methods?
Yet again we have taken a valuable food and transformed it into a degraded version of itself.
Yet another reason that we must take food production away from the food industry and return it to our local communities.
Sources