Read on to discover everything you need to know about this day, as well as the critical role that honey bees play in our everyday lives.
Learn about World Honey Bee Day
World Honey Bee Day is an awareness day whereby honey bee enthusiasts, beekeeping associations and clubs, and beekeepers celebrate the honey bee. It is a day to recognize the contribution that honey bees make to our everyday lives, as well as learning about the different steps that we can take in order to protect this vital species. On World Honey Bee Day, we also pay homage to beekeepers. After all, it is their efforts that make sure that there are healthy and well-managed bees to pollinate crops.
The health benefits of honey
Of course, honey bees provide us with honey, and this is one of the many reasons why we should be thankful for them! Honey is a golden, thick liquid, which is produced by bees using the nectar of plants that are flowering. The kind of flowers that bees visit will impact the texture, smell, and taste of the honey, resulting in different types of honey, including orange blossom, clover, acacia, and manuka honey.
There are a lot of nutritional benefits that are associated with adding a bit of honey to your diet. High-quality honey offers a number of benefits because of the antioxidants that are included. These include phenolic compounds, such as flavonoids, as well as organic acids. The antioxidants that are found in honey have been linked to lowering the risk of strokes, heart attacks, and some forms of cancer. They are also believed to assist in terms of eye health.
There have also been studies that have shown that honey can help to improve your cholesterol levels. If you have high LDL cholesterol levels, then you are going to be at a greater risk of having heart disease. This sort of cholesterol plays a massive role in atherosclerosis, which is the fatty buildup in your arteries that can cause strokes and heart attacks as well. There are more and more studies that are showing that honey can help to enhance your cholesterol levels. This is because it significantly raises the good HDL cholesterol while lowering the total of bad LDL cholesterol.
Honey cannot only benefit you in terms of consuming it, but it has been used for many years as a topical treatment for healing burns and wounds. In fact, this can be dated back to Ancient Egypt. Researchers have concluded that the healing powers of honey come from the anti-inflammatory and antibacterial effects it has, as well as its ability to nourish the tissue that surrounds the wounded area.
Bees are disappearing
Bees are critical to our daily living, yet they are in decline on a worldwide scale. This is because they face a number of different threats.
The use of toxic pesticides is one of these threats. They are also at risk due to habitat loss, as there has been an increase in invasive farming methods and urban developments, meaning that places that honey bees used to call home do not exist anymore.
In honor of World Honey Bee Day, it is good to do your bit in order to raise awareness regarding the risks that honey bees all around the world face and the steps that we can take in order to help them.
You can begin by researching this issue so that you can find more information about the different challenges that bees face and the reasons why their population is on the decline. By doing this, you will then be able to educate others and we can all do our bit to make sure that the number of bees starts to increase again, rather than decline.