| Honey Information |
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Honey is a remarkable supplement to the human diet and a discussion of its properties could be preceded by a long dissertation on the principles of animal nutrition to establish its uniqueness as a food substance. Let us however cut that all short and simply mention that animal nutrients are mostly basically of two types - proteins and carbohydrates - both composed almost entirely of no more than four chemical elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and both obtained by the consumption of other animals, or plants or their derivatives. Meat, milk, eggs and seeds are sources of protein, while carbohydrates usually take the form of starches and sugars.
The proteins provide the amino-acids basic to the construction and maintenance of skin, muscles and all other organs which make up the animal body. Carbohydrates, on the other hand, provide the fuel to energise that living machine Honey is thus a carbohydrate and a source of bodily energy, and in a peculiarly assimilable form. To tell its story one must go back to the source from which its own energy-giving properties are derived - and this of course is sunshine itself. The leaves of plants, as most people know, are given their colour by a green substance in their cells called chlorophyll with the remarkable capacity to absorb and utilise carbon dioxide. This gas, the product of breathing and burning and automation and so many of our other activities is of course the major "green-house gas'", of which we hear so much in global warming discussions. Using energy derived from the suns rays the chlorophyll in the leaf cell is able to separate and retain the carbon of that greenhouse gas and return its oxygen into the atmosphere. The carbon retained in the leaf is used by the plant, in combination with the hydrogen and oxygen of water to form sugar, which is stored in the plant tissue as a liquid solution, or converted into starch for storage in stem root or seeds for later reconversion to soluble sugar and use as such. Plant sugar is thus a means of storing some of the energy of the sun.
Flowering plants reproduce by seeds and in most cases these seeds are the product of fertilisation of their ova by the transfer and deposit on the stigma of pollen from the anthers from the same or preferably another flower of the same species. A large number of flowering plants depend on insects to do this pollen transfer for them in their quest for pollen as a food, the pollen itself also being an adequate protein for the food requirement of these insects. As in other animals, however, insect diet also demands a carbohydrate supplement and, to make their flowers completely attractive to pollinators, many flowering plants have evolved nectaries situated below the floral centre and accessable to insects, only by brushing over the reproductive elements of the flower. The nectar within these floral receptacles is a solution of three types of sugar.Other substances - such as minerals, nitrogen compounds, organic acids,vitamins,pigments and aromatic substances are present but in small amounts |
NAMC Report
