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Lack of water gives honey long shelf life

“Why does honey never spoil?” asked a camper at the Mundelein High School summer STEAM Camp.

Growing older is a great for kids, but not for food. Mold and bacteria in food make aging dangerous and stinky.

A tour of the fridge can offer a quick lesson in rotting food that can trigger upset stomachs. Cheese drawer? Green-and-brown-tinged cheese or white spots on a yellow square of cheese. Fruit bin? Big whiff of rotten, mostly-green lemons. Salad bin? Sopping wet iceberg decaying in the bottom of the drawer.

Outside of the fridge, there are foods that seem to know the secret to eternal life. These include dried nuts, grains and beans. But the oldest of all, the prize winner for longest shelf life — honey.

Archaeologists discovered honey buried in jars alongside pharaohs' must-haves for a proper afterlife party. Honey also was found in a tomb belonging to a woman from the Caucasus dating back 5,000 years. The deliciously sweet, amber colored gooey consistency makes honey quite a prize, whether king or commoner.

A host of animals crave the glisteny sweet treat, too, including wasps, bears, honey badgers, possums, skunks, baboons and chimps.

The secret to honey's staying power is the absence of water. Water encourages bacteria to grow and produce waste, causing spoilage. Honey has a very low water content.

Alicia Dodd, garden caretaker at the Fremont Township community garden, tends to the honey bees living in a top bar hive at the garden and visible through the hive's window.

Honey's shelf life is, well, possibly hundreds of years.

“The low ph, high sugar content, and low water content make it impossible for bacteria and fungi to survive,” Dodd said.

Dodd explained that bees know how to minimize the danger of honey spoilage. Bees work hard to eliminate water from the nectar that produces honey, first regurgitating the nectar until its chemical makeup breaks down into two sugars — fructose and dextrose.

Once the nectar is placed in the hive, special bees speed up the evaporation process by fanning the comb.

Without the extra work to reduce water content, honey will spoil.

“It is important that the honey isn't harvested with too high of a water content or it can ferment,” Dodd said. “It is still edible when fermented, but the taste of the honey changes.”

Once they're nearly done converting nectar to honey and drying off the water, bees cap the cells with wax.

“Beekeepers aim to harvest mainly capped honey,” Dodd said.

Once honey's in the jar, it can develop crystals with time. It is easily returned back to its original consistency by heating it over warm water.

Check it out

The Fremont Public Library in Mundelein suggests these titles on honey and bees:

• “The Bee Book,” by Fergus Chadwick

• “Buzz about Bees,” by Kari-Lynn Winters

• “The Magic School Bus Inside a Beehive,” by Joanna Cole

• “Bees: a Honeyed History,” by Piotr Socha

• “You Wouldn't want to live without Bees!” by Alex Woolf

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