Honey

Honey, a pure sugar, energizes the body and satisfies the desire for sweet tastes shared byhumans and other primates. Europeans and Americans prized it as a table sweetener; inAsia, it was traditionally valuable as a medicine; and in Africa, it was the basis for analcoholic beverage. Pictorial and archeological evidence from Altamira, Spain, dating to15,000 BCE, documents early interest in honeycombs. A wall painting of a comb at CatalHüyük, Anatolia, suggests that apiculture, or beekeeping, thrived as early as 6600 BCE.Later proof of the use of honey in ancient cultures includes honey-based medicinesrecorded in Babylonian recipe books, storage jars found at Thebes, evidence of hivetending in classical Greece and Cyprus, rock honey chambers carved by Sicilian farmersin the Hyblaean Mountains of Syracusa, and the smoking of bees in Egypt, where favorseekerscourted Ramses III with pots of honey. Like the early Egyptians, Australianaborigines trailed bees to their hives and subdued them with smoke in order to gather thecombs.