They how, when, where, who and why of honey and other bee products found in Kyiv markets.
Ivory, lemon, amber and golden brown. Have you caught yourself staring at the rows upon rows of honey on display your local bazaar, just soaking up the appetizing spectacle and variety? Have your been lured by the fragrant aroma? And then there’s taste, each with a distinctive flavor. Beautiful, tasty and healthy, honey is not simply food – it’s a world of its own.
“The Japanese call honey the king of the natural products and also liquid gold – for its color and precious nutritious qualities,” said Vasyl Solomka, the Health Ministry’s chief technologist and amateur beekeeper.
“Bees are amazing animals,” Solomka continued, waxing poetic, “After humans, they create more products than any living creature – and man can’t take advantage of them by taming them but rather by following closely the laws dictated by the bee family.”
Humans have been enjoying honey since primordial times. The custom of eating honey is said to have originated in India and then spread to Eurasia and Africa. Centuries later, European travelers brought honey to the Americas and Australia. In ancient Kyivan Rus, honey and wax were two of the most important trade products.
These days, Ukraine (or Ukrainian bees) produce as much as 60,000 tons of honey per year (the bees keeping half for themselves). The majority is made available through private beekeepers, usually selling their wares along country roads and in city bazaars. Honey is always readily available in Kyiv – but before you buy, it’s good to know what you’re getting into.
Don’t get stung
Quality honey must have a pleasant smell, good taste and natural color.
“If honey is dense, viscous and crystallized, it’s guaranteed to be natural,” said Oleksy Baranyuk, a beekeeper from Odessa Oblast who was hawking his wares at Kyiv’s Demiyivsky Market.
Do not buy stratifying honey or liquid honey in late fall or winter. If honey has liquid between layers, it means there is a foreign substance in it. Honey takes three or four months to crystallize. The exception is acacia honey. If honey is still liquid in late fall or winter, it has been melted by heating. Some vendors attempt to persuade customers that if the “steam bath” (hot water) method is used instead of boiling, the honey retains all its healthy properties. But this is not true.
Avoid buying unripe honey containing coarse granules and lots of liquid. It means that the beekeeper failed to allow for the proper time for the honey to ripen naturally in the hive. Vendors may tell you that unripe honey is just as healthy, but that it can’t be stored for too long. Again, this is not true.
“When honey is unripe it means the fermentation is not completed,” Solomka said. Beekeepers and vendors may also “fake” honey in a number of ways – such as by providing bees with syrup instead of nectar to speed the process or by stretching supplies by mixing honey with starch, burnt sugar or even chalk.
The best guarantee of good honey is to buy from a familiar beekeeper or by getting to know your vendor well.
“Beekeepers are usually people of high morality,” Solomka claimed. “Their job, watching bees and taking care of them, refines them.”
What is honey?
Honey is the winter food of adult bees. Bees make honey out of nectar – the sweet, aromatic juice produced by flowers – using a complicated procedure still not completely understood by people. The entire hive is involved in making honey. Gatherer bees pick up nectar from flowers and process it using a special ferment found in their saliva. Receiver bees then continue the nectar‑transformation process for about 20 minutes, producing unripe liquid honey, which younger bees hang in drops on the hive walls. To reduce the amount of water in the honey, the bees then fan it with their wings. About three days later, bees place this raw honey in the hive’s wax cells, or honeycomb, where it matures. Once ripe, the bees seal the honey in the cells with a wax cap. The honey is considered edible after another three weeks, and it can remain stored in the comb for up to several years.
Kinds of honey
There are dozens of kinds of honey. Ukraine’s most common are buckwheat and flower honey – the beekeeper or seller can tell you what types of flowers flourished in the meadow where the bees pollinated, since this also affects the finished product. Rarer, and therefore more expensive, honeys in Ukraine include linden, acacia and forest honey. And there is even sofora honey – named for a strain of Japanese tree – from the south of the country.
You may also hear a term “May honey.” This refers to some of the earliest honey harvested in the season. Whereas traditionally honey was harvested only after Aug. 19, the religious holiday of Spas, it is now extracted several times a year.
Honey is typically sold in two different forms. Centrifuged honey – the type sold in jars – has been pumped out of the cells with a special machine. More unusual is cell honey – sold right in the honey comb from which it comes. Cell honey, which is more expensive, is considered healthier since it contains about 10 times more lysozyme, an immunity‑bolstering enzyme, than jar honey.
Recipe for health
“Flower honey relieves liver pain and stomachaches, sofora honey is good for diabetes and the heart,” attested Baranyuk.
Given the chance, a market seller will try to convince you that there is a different kind of honey for just about everything that ails you. Tell him where it hurts, and he’ll fix you up with his most‑potent type of honey potion. Now, as to how much of that is hype produced by what at times can be a highly competitive market‑stall environment is debatable – but there’s no denying that honey is healthy.
“Bee products increase the body’s resistance to various diseases, and they ease and speed the recovery process,” Solomka said. “All bee products have anti‑bacterial properties.”
You can find reference books on honey at the Petrivka book market.
According to Iryna Fillipova’s “Health on a Bee’s Wings,” linden honey is the best for bronchitis and pneumonia; buckwheat honey for arteriosclerosis; flower honey for the intestines; and forest honey for insomnia.
Bee products
Besides honey, Fillipova’s book discusses some 10 other healthy‑promoting products produced by bees. These include flower pollen – the small yellow‑brown granules, which are the sperm of the flower. Pollen contains all the amino acids humans need and several groups of vitamins, and a teaspoon each morning helps prevent cardiovascular disorders and increases immunity.
Perga is the pollen processed by bees to feed their larvae. It is even richer in useful substances. It can be found in the honey sealed in wax cells.
Propolis is a dark‑green or brown substance. Bees make it by mixing their saliva with tree sap, and they use it to disinfect the hives. Various tinctures of propolis can be used to treat skin ailments and stomach ulcers.
Honey‑keeping
A dollop of honey in a cup of piping hot tea is delicious, but don’t expect it to cure what ails you. When heated to a temperature of more than 37 degrees Celsius, honey loses most of its healing qualities. You might, therefore, want to consider eating honey not in your tea but about 15 minutes before or after you drink it.
When storing honey, Solomka says to forget about the traditional 3‑liter jars – since when the lid is opened too often, the honey absorbs too much air and moisture and can lose its potency and its taste. He recommends storing honey in half‑liter jars, stored away from the light and at a temperature between freezing and 10 degrees.
Where to get it
Honey is usually sold in glass jars: 1 liter = 1.4 kilograms; 0.5 liter = 750 grams; 0.25 liter jar = 375 grams. Some average Kyiv market prices are Hr 10 for a kilo of flower honey; Hr 13.50 for a kilo of acacia honey; Hr 4 for 10 grams of propolis; and Hr 12 for a 0.25‑liter jar of pollen.
You can find buckwheat or sunflower honey for as little as Hr 5 per half‑liter from street vendors.
Vasyl Solomka also sells honey. He can be contacted at tel. 213‑6776/3284.
