It's a good question, but not to worry for honey is
completely kosher, not violating any of the dietary restrictions found in
scripture!
Honey bees convert nectar from flowers into honey by a
process of regurgitation and evaporation. Regurgitation may not sound kosher, but it is
okay here. Bees store the honey as a
primary food source in wax honeycombs inside their beehive. Humans extract the honey from the beehive and
bottle it.
So let's look at the process in a bit more detail and see
how the honey comes about.
Foraging bees land on flowers and use their long, tube-like tongues
to suck nectar from the flowers. They swallow the nectar but store it in a "honey
crop", a special type of stomach which comes before the actual digestive
system stomach of the bee. The nectar never enters the bee's digestive system! The
honey crop is more of "pouch" used to port nectar back to the hive
and transfer it to worker bees.
The worker bees "chew" the nectar for a period (about
30 minutes or so) during which time enzymes break complex sugars in the nectar
into simple sugars. This final form of
nectar is then spread throughout the honeycomb which allows remaining water in
the mass to evaporate. As the water evaporates, the nectar thickens and becomes
honey. Honey is more digestible to the
bees than the nectar, and it is also protected from any bacteria. At some point, the worker bees
"assess" the thickness of the honey, and they seal off the end of the
honeycomb with a cap of wax. This keeps the
honey in permanent storage until it is eaten by the bees - or as in our case -
a beekeeper harvests the honey for us humans!
Honey consists of mostly fructose, glucose, and the water
which did not evaporate. It also contains other sugars as well as trace
enzymes, minerals, vitamins, and amino acids.
But most importantly, it is only converted nectar, not a product of the bee itself, and completely kosher consisting
of nothing forbidden by our Creator!
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated.