Excerpt:
WHEN PREHISTORIC MAN reached deep into a bee tree or a cleft in the rocks for a highly prized store of honeycomb, he must have felt that the prize was worth the price in stings from the outraged bees. Veneration of the bee and its products, honey and wax, can be traced through the entire span of man’s record; honey has been an article of commerce for many thousands of years. As such, many definitions and standards have attempted to describe it. Honey is a sweet, viscous liquid prepared by bees from nectar collected from plant nectaries and stored by them for food. This definition excludes honeydew, which does not originate directly from nectaries (floral or extra-floral) but either from plant secretions (manna) or more commonly from the excretion of certain hemipterous insects (aphids, leaf hoppers, scale insects). While feeding on plant sap, these insects excrete from the alimentary canal a sweet liquid that is sometimes gathered by bees and stored for food, during partial or total absence of a nectar supply. More will be said of honeydew later in this chapter; sufficient now to note that it differs in most of its properties from honey.
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