Your Complete Guide To Honey

Have you ever walked into the grocery store and picked up any old honey, thinking it’s a superfood?

Do you keep hearing about honey bees dying and are just genuinely confused as to what that means for you because quite frankly, bees scare you?

Have you seen ‘bee pollen’ as an acai bowl topping which costs $1 extra, and despite not knowing wtf it’s good for, got it anyway?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above, this post is going to clarify EVERYTHING. So back story, about a year back, I stumbled on Beekeepers Naturals and kept seeing their B.Powered Honey pop up. No guys, I could not escape this thing. My friends were talking about it, it was sold at my favourite superfood cafe, it was even in that ‘recommended for you’ section at one of the online health food stores I shop from. So I caved. I took it as a sign from the universe and bought it.

It took me, a layman, no time to realize that this was not your ordinary honey. It was honey on crack. The healing benefits were insane. I got a tickle in my throat and treated it with JUST this stuff. And it worked!

Anyway, so here I am, obsessed with Beekeeper’s Naturals, when it dawns on me that the honey that I’ve had all my life has been quite different from the miracle honey that Beekeepers has. Honestly, up until a year back, I could not tell you the difference between $7 grocery store honey and high-quality raw honey.

So, I decided that I’d do a blog post. Because honestly, honey is a tricky business guys. There’s so much conversation about colony collapse, fake honey, etc, that I wanted someone to break it down for us. And who better to take on such a task than the founder of Beekeepers Naturals herself, Carly Stein?

I hope you guys enjoy reading this as much as I did!

We all know that honey is a superfood. What are some of its benefits?
Cultures have been using raw honey for centuries to promote healing, beauty, and energy. It’s practically the OG superfood! Cleopatra used to bathe in it to encourage a glowing complexion. The Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed it to help heal burns and wounds. Some cultures even considered honey so magical, they used it exclusively as an offering to the gods.

All these millennia later, scientists have given us hard proof that raw honey boasts some pretty amazing healing properties. It is loaded with powerful antioxidants, germ-fighting properties, and beneficial enzymes. That’s why it is so wonderful at clearing up blemishes, supporting immune health, and helping to heal minor scrapes and small burns.

Cleopatra was on the right track too, using honey on her skin. It’s actually a really powerful beautifier. It is acts as a natural humectant, so it draws moisture into the skin and helps to hydrate thirsty cells while clarifying pores. Raw honey even works from the inside out to promote internal balance and amp up your skin’s natural glow. The Queen of the Nile really knew her stuff!

What should we look for when purchasing honey? How do we know it’s high quality?
The first thing I recommend that people look for is the word ‘raw’. If your honey isn’t raw, it’s no better than sugar water. Pasteurization actually destroys the beneficial enzymes and nutrients in honey, so always, always, always opt for raw.

I also recommend buying sustainably sourced raw honey (which is what Beekeeper’s Naturals is all about). Sustainably harvested honey tends to be much higher quality, since it comes from happy and healthy bees that are foraging on clean flowers all day long. The healthier the bees and the surrounding environment, the better the honey!

What’s the difference between raw honey and regular honey?
Raw honey is real honey.
‘Regular’ honey has been ultra-filtered and pasteurized, which eliminates nearly all of its beneficial compounds. Some ‘regular’ honeys are even sneakily adulterated with cheaper, inflammatory sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup—gross. That’s why it is important to always, always choose raw honey. The other processed stuff simply isn’t honey.

Since raw honey has so many health benefits, is it detrimental to mix it into warm drinks and/or cook with it?
When it comes to tea or coffee, if you can drink it, it’s probably fine for your raw honey. Most people enjoy their hot drinks around 71 degrees C. As long as you’re not letting your honey sit in near-boiling water for a while, it should be fine.

If you want to bake with honey, yes it will probably lose some of its beneficial properties. But odds are it will retain some goodness—and it’s definitely a better choice than bleached white sugar! Raw honey is a whole food, natural sweetener—it beats white sugar every time.

Your superfood blend has propolis, bee pollen and royal jelly – what do each of these things do?
You’re talking about B.Powered, which is one of my favorite products! It’s a blend of all the hive superfoods, so you get this incredible spectrum of benefits in one little spoonful. Here what’s inside…

Propolis—This is the immune system of the hive. Propolis is a collection of plant resins that the bees use to line the inner walls of their hive to keep microscopic foreign invaders out. Bees even line the hive entrance with a propolis door mat so that no bees track in any nasties. Propolis has really powerful germ-fighting properties and, as someone with an autoimmune disorder, is the most effective form of natural immune support I’ve been able to find. (The first product I created when I started Beekeeper’s Naturals was a pure propolis spray to support my immunity. Needless to say, it really took off from there!)

Bee pollen—This stuff is literally nature’s multivitamin. Bee pollen looks like little golden nuggets and is super rich in protein, along with important nutrients like energizing B vitamins. I like to pop a handful as a snack or sprinkle them onto my smoothies for an extra nutrient boost.

Royal jelly—This is known for its beauty and brain benefits. Studies have shown that royal jelly may help to powerfully support memory and mental acuity. On the skin, royal jelly can actually have a regenerative effect and feeds skin cells to help them heal, deeply moisturize, and glow. This is the exclusive food of the queen bee, who lives 40 times longer than the average bee, so her diet must be pretty special.

In B.Powered, all these superfoods get blended into raw honey. B.Powered my go-to for energizing in the morning, refueling mid-workout, supporting daily immune health, and clarifying my skin—I really love using a B.Powered face mask to clear up my complexion and boost my glow. (And I was pretty psyched when I heard that Drew Barrymore does, too!)

I’m also fascinated by the all the different kinds of honeys you sell. What’s the difference between them? (buckwheat honey, wildflower honey, raspberry blossom honey)
So, the really cool thing that a lot of people don’t know is that good honey can be a lot like wine and coffee—honeys can have different notes and flavor profiles. Single-source honeys reflect the flavor of the blossoms where the bees harvested their nectar. If a hive is smack in the middle of a raspberry field, their honey is going to have the distinctive crisp and fruity flavor of raspberry blossoms. Wildflower honey has a subtle floral flavor, whereas buckwheat honey is much more earthy, rich, and robust.

(A little fun fact, buckwheat honey contains some of the highest antioxidant levels of any honey on the planet! In studies, it actually goes toe to toe with manuka in terms of healing potential. It’s pretty crazy!)

I think it’s really fun to do little honey tastings, moving from lightest to darkest. It really makes you appreciate honey in a whole new light.

Lately, there’s been a lot of light shed on the concept of honey laundering, could you explain what that is and what consumers should be wary of when purchasing honey?
Honey laundering may sound like a funny take on ‘money laundering’, but it’s really serious. It is an international-scale scandal.

A lot of the honey imported from other countries, especially around China, isn’t honey at all. It’s a concoction of cheap fillers with a little bit of honey mixed in in order to maximize profits. These fillers could be as innocuous as water, they could be synthetic sweeteners like high fructose corn syrup, or they may even contain potentially harmful chemicals (some Chinese honey has tested positive for dangerous illegal antibiotics). Yet, these products are still labeled “pure honey”, which is incredibly deceiving.

This is a massive issue and regulations have been unable to get ahead of the scandal. To protect yourself from this scam, I suggest that you only buy raw honey. Most of these adulterated products are ultra-filtered and pasteurized. If you buy raw honey, you sidestep a lot of those potential nasties. And if a honey seems too cheap, it probably is. Honey a precious, time-consuming product. If it costs just a few dollars, be wary.

If you want to find out more, there is actually a really great documentary series on Netflix that covers honey adulteration. It’s called “Rotten”—exposing how broken and deceitful our food system really is—and the very first episode dives into the dark side of the honey industry. I highly recommend checking it out.

There’s also a lot of conversation around honeybee health and colony collapse. What do you think is the culprit and are there any possible solutions?
Colony collapse started back in 2006, and it has decimated bee populations. It’s tough to point a finger at just one culprit for colony collapse—the unfortunate phenomenon when an entire colony of bees abandon their hive and queen and die out. There are a few potential reasons for the rise of this disorder…

1. Neonics. Also called neonicotinoids, these pesticides have been proven to distort bees’ spatial reasoning, meaning they get confused and lost and may not be able to find their way back to the hive. Neonics are highly toxic to bees and may make honey bees more susceptible to parasites and pathogens, which further puts the hive at risk for colony collapse. And yet, neonics continue to be widely sprayed throughout North America. (Actually, Canada recently banned 2 neonics, following the lead of the EU.) But it is important to note that neonics persist in the soil for 6 years after they are sprayed, so they are still a major issue, even if they were banned worldwide tomorrow.

2. Habitat loss. There is less and less green space for bees to forage. Monocropping, the agricultural practice where acres and acres of fields are dedicated to just one type of crop, is particularly harmful. Bees need food to eat throughout the 3 seasons. In monocropping, when the crop is out of season, the area becomes a food desert for the bees (not to mention the likely use of harmful pesticides on these big monocropping farms). Bees need clean flowers to feast on spring, summer, and fall. They need natural green spaces and wildflowers, and we are losing more and more of that each year.

3. Climate change. With the shifting weather patterns across the planet, the bees’ hibernation patterns are getting thrown off. Some scientists even fear that, if there is an early springtime thaw, bees will mistime their pollination and miss the blooms altogether. And that would be devastating—both for the ecosystem and the bees. We aren’t sure exactly what effect climate change will have on the bees, but we do know that they are very environmentally sensitive and do not adapt quickly, so it is definitely a pressing issue.

So there is a lot going against the bees right now. But there is a lot YOU can do to help them. You can give them clean food and habitat in your own yard by creating a bee garden and a bee bath. You can stop using pesticides on your lawn and do your best to buy organic whenever possible. You can support local growers at your farmer’s market who are pesticide-free. And, of course, you can spread the word! The more people who know about how easy it actually is to directly support the bees, the better off our buzzing friends will be!

Could you share your favourite way to enjoy honey?
Of course! I love taking a teaspoon of honey at bedtime in some herbal tea to help me sleep. Because I am always busy and on the go, when bedtime rolls around my mind is still buzzing! But with a little raw honey, I am able to fall asleep pretty quickly—and sleep like a baby.

A little bit of bedtime honey actually helps your brain absorb more of the sleep-inducing amino acid, tryptophan. At nighttime, tryptophan is used to create more melatonin—the sleep hormone that dreams are made of! It also stabilizes blood glycogen levels so that your brain doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night in a crisis search for fuel.

I also love using raw honey in my salad dressings. I make my own salad dressings at home because it’s pretty easy and I like to avoid the processed, caloric, overly sweetened dressings that you get in the store. Seriously, I make a mean vinaigrette.