HONEY. Honey has been regarded, from the remotest ages, as a product of the first impor tance to man. Wild honey is eagerly sought by savage and barbarous tribes, and bees have been kept from the earliest ages by civilized man. Honey is the saccharine fluid of flowers, gathered by bees and deposited by them in the cells of the waxen combs. Honey undergoes slight modifications in the honey-bag of the bees, but although somewhat changed chemically it retains the flavor, and to some extent the aroma of the flowers from which it was gathered. Under a powerful microscope the pollen of the plants, from which the honey was gathered, may be, it is said, detected, and thus often referred to the plant to which it belonged. Hence certain districts have become famous for its honey, as Mount Ida, in Crete, and others again are noted for the poisonous quality of the honey, as that of Trebizond. The substances recognized in honey, are grape sugar, manna, gum, muci lage, extractive matter, a little wax, pollen, acid, and the substances producing the odor of honey. Honey, as it drains from the comb, is quite fluid,•but as generally pressed out it con tains a sugar identical with grape sugar. This,
however, except its disposition to candy, is not essentially different from the fluid portion. All honey is disposed tO crystallize with age, and also to become yellow. The adulterations of honey are numerous. Starch, chalk, calcined gypsum, and even pipe clay have been used. Of late years, however, the adulteration of honey consists chiefly in adding glucose, a sugar now manufactured largely from corn, but only con taining about thirty-four per cent. of saccharine, calling cane sugar 100. The adulteration by means of starch, chalk, etc., may be easily detected by heating the honey and letting it stand, when the impurities will settle to the bot tom. Honey adulterated with glucose is more difficult of detection. Combs once used are even filled with the mixture. For this reason, pure white comb, capped by the bees, com mands fully double the price, in the markets, of strained honey.
An exudation of sweet gummy matter from the leaves of plants, espec ially the oak, beech, linden, and hop.