Honey, as you know, is a sweet substance. It is also a wonderful food. No one can say how long humans have been eating honey. There are numerous mentions of honey in the Old Testament of the Bible, and rock paintings dating back some 8,000 years depict humans collecting honey from bee nests. It is probably safe to assume that humans have been eating honey for most of our existence.

We have learned about some of the foods in the diet of ancient humans because identifiable pieces and parts of food items show up in the fossil record. Bones and shells from animals and stems and seeds from plants don’t disintegrate rapidly and persist in rock formations discovered by archeologists. On the other hand, a liquid such as honey is not likely to be preserved in such a way.

It is also a matter of speculation about how humans discovered that honey was good to eat. We do know that several species of animals, including chimpanzees and great apes, consume honey. So if our closest animal relatives have had a sweet tooth, it is likely that some of our earliest ancestors had a similar taste for sweets, too. Or maybe early humans noticed that other animals were eating honey and decided to try it.

While we don’t know when or why humans first consumed honey, it has turned out to be a beneficial food. Some evolutionary biologists have even hypothesized that honey consumption, along with eating meat and underground tubers, might have supplied the quality of nutrition needed for the human brain to develop to its current size. Now that’s food for thought.

Honey is produced from the nectar of flowers. That nectar undergoes chemical transformation in the gut of worker honey bees before it is regurgitated into the comb. Honey contains some 200 substances but mostly is made up of the sugars fructose and glucose. It is an energy food – with around 64 calories per teaspoon – and is easy to digest.

That is why honey has often been touted as a quick energy source.

Regardless of exactly how humans got started eating honey, it has become a widespread practice. Modern people in all societies are honey consumers. Ancient people first accommodated their sweet tooth by being honey collectors – they robbed nests of wild honey bees. At some point in time humans began tending honey bee colonies. Bee keeping was likely to have been one of the first examples of animal husbandry as an agricultural pursuit.

Today beekeeping is a major enterprise. According to Bee Culture Magazine there are between 115,000 and 120,000 U.S. beekeepers. To be sure, most of those people are backyard hobbyists with five or less hives.

Commercial beekeepers produce honey and bees wax, provide colonies of bees for pollination services, and produce queens and package bees.

In 2013, the commercial bee industry produced 148 million pounds of honey worth more than $300 million. According to the National Honey Board, honey consumption in the U.S. is estimated to be about 1.3 pounds per person per year.

That estimate is based on all uses, including in baked products or as a sweetener. The U.S. honey bee industry only provides about one-third of the honey consumed in the United States. The rest is imported from countries such as Brazil, Mexico, India, Ukraine and Vietnam.

The U.S. production of honey is from some 2.6 million colonies of bees, according to 2013 data. The leading honey-producing state that year was North Dakota. The other states in the top five were Montana, South Dakota, Florida and California.

Almost all insect-pollinated plants provide nectar as an attractant to insects, primarily bees. You could say that flowers use nectar as a bribe for bees to transport pollen. It is a win-win situation.

The plants get pollinated, and the bees get the raw material to manufacture honey.

All honey is not the same. The floral source of the nectar determines the characteristics of honey, including the taste, sugar content and color. Color of honey ranges across the spectrum from white to black, but most are shades of yellow or amber. In general, lighter-colored honey tends to be sweeter and darker-colored honey stouter in taste.

The word honey not only describes the product of the hive, but it is also a term of endearment. Why not? Who wouldn’t want to be called “a sweet little drop of bee regurgitant?”

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with questions or comments for Tom Turpin may write to him in care of this publication.