The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life

Honey – ancient liquid gold

A multitude of factors– its acidity, lack of water, and the existence of hydrogen peroxide– function in absolute harmony, allowing honey to last forever.

Modern archeologists excavating ancient Egyptian tombs have often discovered something unpredictable among the tombs’ artifacts: pots of honey, thousands of years old and yet still completely preserved. Through centuries, archeologists have discovered the food remains unspoiled, a distinct testament to the everlasting shelf-life of honey.

There are some other examples of foods that keep– indefinitely– in their raw state: salt, sugar, and dried rice are a few. However, there is something about the sticky treat; it can stay preserved in an edible form, and while you would not wish to devour raw rice or straight salt, one can ostensibly dip into a thousand-year-old container of honey and enjoy it without preparation, just as if it were a day old. Honey’s durability offers it other properties– primarily medicinal– that other resistant foods do not have. Which brings up the question– exactly what makes honey such a special food?

Harmonious combination

The answer is as complicated as honey’s taste– you only get a food source without an expiration date with many factors operating in perfect harmony.

The first originates from the chemical composition of honey itself. It is primarily a sugar. Sugars are hygroscopic, which signifies they have very little water in their natural state yet can readily trap moisture if left unsealed.

As Amina Harris, executive director of the Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute at the University of California, Davis, explains that honey in its natural kind is very low in moisture. Only a few bacteria or microorganisms can survive in an environment like that, they perish. They are smothered by it, essentially.

What Harris mentions stands for a crucial feature of honey’s long life: for it to spoil, there must be something inside of it that can spoil. With such an unwelcoming environment, organisms can not survive long enough inside the jar of honey to have the possibility to spoil.

Honey is additionally naturally very acidic. “It has a pH that falls in between 3 and 4.5, around, which acid will kill off practically anything that wishes to grow there,” Harris discusses. Bacteria and spoil-ready microorganisms should look elsewhere for a home– the life span inside of honey is too low.

Honey is not the only hygroscopic food source out there. Molasses, for instance, which originates from the byproduct of cane sugar, is exceptionally hygroscopic and is acidic, though much less so than honey (molasses has a pH of about 5.5). And yet– although it might take a long time, as the sugar cane item has a much longer shelf-life than fresh produce, eventually molasses will spoil.

Why does one sugar solution spoil while a different one lasts forever?

Enter bees

” Bees are magical,” Harris jokes. There is definitely unique alchemy that goes into honey. Nectar, the first material gathered by bees to make it, is naturally extremely high in water– anywhere from 60-80 percent, by Harris’ estimation.

Through the process of making honey, the bees play a huge part in getting rid of much of this moisture by waving their wings to dry out the nectar completely. On top of behavior, the chemical makeup of a bee’s stomach also plays a big part in honey’s durability. Bees have an enzyme in their stomachs called glucose oxidase (PDF).

When the bees regurgitate the nectar from their mouths into the combs to make honey, this enzyme mixes with the nectar, breaking it down into two byproducts: gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. “Then,” Harris describes, “hydrogen peroxide is the following thing that goes into work against all these other bad things that can perhaps grow.”

Consequently, it has been utilized for centuries as a medicinal remedy. Because it’s so thick, rejects any growth, and has hydrogen peroxide, it creates the perfect barrier against wound infection. The earliest recorded use of honey for medicinal purposes originates from Sumerian clay tablets, which mention that honey was utilized in 30 percent of prescriptions. The old Egyptians utilized medical honey regularly, making lotions to treat skin and eye conditions. “Honey was utilized to cover an injury or a burn or a slash, or something like that because nothing can expand on it– so it was a natural bandage,” Harris discusses.

Many applications

When honey is not sealed in a container, it absorbs moisture. “While it’s drawing water out of the injury (which is how it could get infected), it’s also releasing this very minute amount of hydrogen peroxide. The amount of hydrogen peroxide that comes off honey is specifically what we need– it’s so small and so minute that it stimulates recovery.” And honey for recovery of open tears is no longer simply folk medicine– in the past ten years, Derma Sciences, a medical device company, has been marketing and selling MEDIHONEY, bandages covered in honey utilized in hospitals around the world.

If you purchase your honey from the grocery store, that little plastic bottle of golden nectar has been heated, strained, and processed to ensure that it has zero particulates, suggesting that there is nothing in the liquid for molecules to crystallize on. Your supermarket honey will look the same for nearly permanently. If you acquire it from a small-scale supplier, specific particulates might remain, from pollen to enzymes. With these particulates, the honey might crystallize. However, do not fret– if it’s sealed, it’s not spoiled and will not be for rather a long time.

A true testament of longevity

A container of honey’s seal, it turns out, is the last variable that’s key to honey’s long life span, as exhibited by the storied millennia-old Egyptian specimens. While honey is absolutely a super-food, it is not miraculous– if you leave it out, unsealed in a humid environment, it will certainly spoil. As Harris explains,” As long as the lid stays on it and no water is included in it, honey will not go bad. As quickly as you include water to it, it may spoil. Alternatively, opening up the cover may get even more water, and it might spoil.”

So if you are interested in storing honey for hundreds of years, do what the bees do and maintain it sealed– a tricky thing to do with this scrumptious treat!

Read the original article on The Smithsonian Magazine.

Read more: Scientists Develop an Effective Method for Creating New-to-Nature Enzymes