You should rub honey on your everywhere

Honey is awesome. I’ve found its best consumed when combined with nougat and wrapped in dark chocolate but I digress.

Indulge me while I digress my way to diabetes

Honey also has some pretty amazing properties including it being broadly antimicrobial and seemingly able to promote healing. My Nan would always give me a spoonful of honey alongside other meds when I had colds and flus but as you can see below it can have pretty amazing results on far more serious injuries.

Before and after shot of topical honey treatment for 3 weeks. You're welcome. Adapted from Efem (1988)

Honey’s healing powers can be summarised into 5 main ingredients and activities of the components of honey;

1. Hydrogen peroxide – Honey contains an enzyme called glucose oxidase which breaks down glucose sugars and generates hydrogen peroxide, a kind of bleach, when there is free water available. In case you missed the antimicrobial component it was friggin BLEACH IN YOUR HONEY. I can feel you wondering why bee’s bleach there own food supply and it turns out that is very simple. Any available water can cause the honey to spoil so the presence of glucose oxidase in the honey is an inbuilt anti-spoiling mechanism, pretty smart huh?
2. Sugar – Having said what I did above there is very little water because of the vast quantity of sugar dissolved into honey. The lack of free water makes it very difficult for bacteria to survive.
3. Methylglyoxal or MGO – This compound is an incredibly interesting and powerful antibacterial compound but it is only found in certain natural honeys like Manuka honey from New Zealand but can be made in artificial greenhouses as well. This is the stuff that is making honey a very interesting topical salve in medical honey treatments such as MediHoney.
4. Bee Defensin 1 – Bee Defensin is an antimicrobial peptide (AMP) that for a long time was thought to be exclusively found in the Royal Jelly. But fairly recent discoveries have found it in the honey, but more on AMPs in a second.
5. Acidity – Finally, honey is reasonably acidic and remains so even when diluted holding a pH of approximately 3.5. Nothing that likes eating you particularly likes living in acid so this property is very important.

No single property is more important than the others and the multifactorial nature of honey’s activities is probably the key to its amazing antimicrobial nature. Having said this, Bee Defensin 1 and other identified AMPs in honey such as Apidaecin may have much more interesting roles that are only recently being uncovered.

Typically defensins interact with the bacterial membrane and do…..

Apidaecins work differently however and instead have been tracked into the microbial cytoplasm where they have been observed to bind the protein called DnaK which is involved in helping the bacterial cell handle stress (not the hard day at the office kind, the my environment is trying to tear me apart kind). By binding and inactivating DnaK bacterial cells cannot respond to very hostile and stressful environment completely and as a result they die, making apidaecins a very interesting and attractive target for drug development and structural biology.

Interestingly, apidaecins seem to also have the ability to alter the host immune system by changing chemotaxis, apoptosis, cytokine/chemokine production, antigen presentation and the Th1/Th2 balance.

Some recent work backs up this suggestion by testing the insect apidaecin’s effect in a mammalian system. While apidaecin is insect derived it appears to sufficiently similar to AMPs in humans that is can modify the activity of our immune system. When macrophages in particular were incubated with apidaecin they started pumping out chemokines and cytokines that promote increased antimicrobial activity in these cells. Additionally when these cells were stimulated with apidaecins and lipopolysaccharide (a potent immune system antagonist found on the surface of many bacterial cells) apidaecion seemed to counter some of the pro-inflammatory effect suggesting it can both promote and regulate the response to microbes.

While only preliminary it seems honey and it’s various components might have more secrets to unveil which will further develop our understanding of the anti-microbial nature of this environmental product and at the same time its pro-immune responses elicited when we use it.

Tavano, R., Segat, D., Gobbo, M., & Papini, E. (2011). The Honeybee Antimicrobial Peptide Apidaecin Differentially Immunomodulates Human Macrophages, Monocytes and Dendritic Cells Journal of Innate Immunity, 3 (6), 614-622 DOI:10.1159/000327839
Kwakman, P., te Velde, A., de Boer, L., Speijer, D., Vandenbroucke-Grauls, C., & Zaat, S. (2010). How honey kills bacteria The FASEB Journal, 24 (7), 2576-2582 DOI: 10.1096/fj.09-150789