Honey is a thick syrup, having a deep amber colour, scented and with a sweet taste which is much better than sugar. It is produced by bees as they collect flower or fruit nectar from living parts of plants or honey dews from other insects. They then carry this nectar to their hive, where it is made into honey. The honey is then stored by the bees inside their honey combs, where it matures. Finally, the bees moisture-proof seal the honey.
Honey has a long history in Greece - Zeus first used honey on Mount Olympus.
Early forms of honey collecting entailed the destruction of the entire colony when the honey was harvested. The wild hive was crudely broken into, using smoke to suppress the bees, the honeycombs were torn out and smashed up — along with the eggs, larvae and honey they contained. The liquid honey from the destroyed brood nest was crudely strained through a sieve or basket. This was destructive and unhygienic, but for hunter-gatherer societies this did not matter, since the honey was generally consumed immediately and there were always more wild colonies to exploit.
But in settled societies the destruction of the bee colony meant the loss of a valuable resource; this drawback made beekeeping both inefficient and something of a "stop and start" activity. There could be no continuity of production and no possibility of selective breeding, since each bee colony was destroyed at harvest time, along with its precious queen. Since sugar was a product unknown for ancient civilizations, honey was essential for their diet and of course an important ingredient for making sweets. Honey for ancient peoples was a gift sent sent by the gods, since they believed it fell from the heavens every morning on the leaves of the flowers, so that the bees could then collect it.
The therapeutical agents of honey were well known, and that is why beekeeping was active in many places, especially in Greece and Egypt. Thousands of years ago, humans began to domesticate wild bees in artificial hives made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, pottery vessels, and woven straw baskets or “skeps”. The walls of the sun temple of Nyuserre Ini, from the 5th Dynasty before 2422 BC, depicts workers blowing smoke into hives as they are removing honeycombs. Honey played an important role in the lives of ancient people. They used to fill large pots with honey mixed with wine as an offer to the gods and the souls of their dead.
In prehistoric Greece (Crete and Mycenae), bee keeping was systemic, as can be seen in the finds of hives, smoking pots, honey extractors and other beekeeping paraphernalia in Knossos. Beekeeping was considered a highly valued industry controlled by beekeeping overseers - owners of gold rings depicting bee keeping scenes.
During the medieval period abbeys and monasteries were centers of beekeeping, since beeswax was highly prized for candles and fermented honey was used to make alcoholic mead in areas of Europe where vines would not grow.
The 18th and 19th centuries saw successive stages of a revolution in beekeeping, which allowed the bees themselves to be preserved when taking the harvest. This revolution in beekeeping practice was completed through the perfection of the movable comb hive by Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth, a descendant of Yorkshire farmers who emigrated to the United States.
He designed a series of wooden frames within a rectangular hive box, carefully maintaining the correct space between successive frames, and found that the bees would build parallel honeycombs in the box without bonding them to each other or to the hive walls. This enables the beekeeper to slide any frame out of the hive for inspection, without harming the bees or the comb, protecting the eggs, larvae and pupae contained within the cells. It also meant that combs containing honey could be gently removed and the honey extracted without destroying the comb. The emptied honey combs could then be returned to the bees intact for refilling.
Honey in Skopelos is mainly pine honey from conifer trees, chestnut honey and flower-honey from the nectar of fruit trees and wild flowers such as thyme. Dark honeys are rich in micro-nutrients (potassium, sodium, iron, phosphorus) and have a rich nutritional value; while light colored honeys have a more pleasant scent and taste.
Pine honey
Pine honey has a very special scent, which some people liken to the scent of iodine. The colour of the pine honey is darker than thyme honey. Pine honey produced during Spring is brighter and clearer than honey produced during the Autumn.
Pine honey extracts its sugar rather slowly, since it is low in glucose. It is a honey of high nutritional value since it contains minerals and micro-nutrients such as calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron and copper.
Chestnut honey
This is produced from the nectar and honey dews of the chestnut tree, a very common tree throughout Northern Greece and the Sporades. It has a lasting, strong, mildly bitter taste. Its colour varies depending upon its origin from light brown to dark brown and black. It crystallizes slowly after 1-2 years and it is very rich in micro-nutrients.
Blossom honey
This is produced from flower nectar. Among the blossom honeys are the thyme and orange tree honey.
Thyme honey is very aromatic and crystallizes within 6 to 18 months from production.