There are many reasons why the people should choose honey for their principal food rather than the beet sugar which is now so largely consumed. In the first place, honey is a pure, natural, undoctored sweet, while in the manufacture of ordinary sugar the use of more or less noxious chemicals seems to be indispensable. When a stock of bees must be artificially fed, and common grocers’ sugar is used for the purpose, the result is generally that half the stock is poisoned by the chemicals with which the sugar has been treated at the mill. And if this is its effect on bees, the inference must be that it cannot prove altogether wholesome for men. But its purity is not the chief reason why honey should be the universal sweet-food of the people. Honey is the ordinary sugar of nectar concentrated and converted into what is chemically known as grape-sugar; and thus, in ripe honey, the first and most important part of digestion is already effected before it leaves the comb. This explains why so many delicate people, and particularly children, can assimilate food sweetened with honey, when they can take no other form of sweet.
Doctors are continually finding some new virtue in honey. Its gently regulating action has been long known, and there is good authority for stating that there is not an organ in the human body which does not benefit from its habitual use. In all wasting diseases, and triumphantly in consumption, it will prevail as an up-builder when everything else fails. There is no doubt at all that cases of consumption have been entirely cured by a liberal diet of honey; and, notoriously, honey is the main ingredient in nearly all patent medicines for diseases of the chest and throat. Therapeutic hints from laymen are generally looked upon askance by medical men—at least, by those of the old-fashioned type; yet, on the chance that this page may come under the eye of some of the more elastic-minded, the thing may be hazarded. There are many who believe in it, and with good reason, as a sovereign specific where the disease is a wasting one. It is nothing else than the once famous Athole Brose, which, as all Scottish bee-keepers know, consist of equal parts of good thick honey, preferably from ling-heather, and of cream, and of mature Scotch whisky from the pot-still. Little and often is the rule for its administration, but, unlike most old wife’s remedies, faith has nothing to do with its wonder-working. Scepticism is a soil in which it seems to flourish as well as any.