• We’ve reached the end of the adventurous antics of Alexander the Great in his mellified state—I hope my posts have amazed and amused you. As for the sticky process at the heart of the story, perhaps you’re thinking: oh, those fascinating, misguided ancients and their quaint beliefs.
• Think again. Modern chemistry has confirmed that honey is an effective antibiotic, killing bacteria in a different way than drugs like penicillin do. Regarding its other qualities, (and by merest coincidence a quote from an entry in my new book, How to Mellify a Corpse) “Although honey has been used for millennia to preserve fruit and meat, the length of time it can preserve a human body has long been the subject of debate.”
• In 1991, on a university campus in Baghdad, a city better known 2,000 years ago as Babylon, a pair of distinguished Iraqi scientists put honey to the test. They began a 6-year study of honey as a tissue preservative. For their experiment, they used mice, rabbits, and two small human fetuses that had miscarried at 16 and 20 weeks (the latter used with parental consent plus permission from the ethics committee of the Baghdad College of Medicine.)
• Immersed in honey for varying periods, kept at room temperature in glass jars for one to three years, all subjects shrank in size and weight. Decay: none. They also retained their shape and hair, turning darker (not, however, as dark as Egyptian mummies, which blackened due to natron). The scientists also kept a number of skin biopsies in honey; on being transferred to a saline solution they regained the consistency, texure, and color of fresh skin. The success of this longterm study offered new hope
for burn victims and others needing tissue.
• And it proved that the ancient art of mellification or honey embalming really did work.
• Judging by the paucity of references online, the final report of doctors Khalifa E. Sharquie and Rafid A. Nijim (published in the 2004 Saudi Medical Journal and available online as well)  got little fanfare. But physicians and medical researchers around the globe are making good use of their powerful findings.
• Will honey embalming ever catch on as the elite green way to go? Not likely. Why? Just ask the overworked, pesticide-hammered honeybees. Honey is a more critical commodity in today’s world than you might imagine. The sweet stuff we dribble on toast or yogurt? Only a minor portion of honeybee output goes in that direction. Most honey ends up in the food industry, flavoring cereals, breads, and products like barbecue sauce.
• The real elephant in the room, however, is the tobacco industry, which uses copious amounts of honey to make cigarettes  (and pipe tobacco, etc) taste and smell better. USDA honey expert Vaughn  Bryant is also quoted as saying that honey also enhances the body’s ability to absorb nicotine.  Oh boy.
• How about we set aside the world’s diminishing amount of honey for medical needs and table use? Better yet, how about first we save our bees to do the job we most depend on them to do: pollination. This industrious insect is directly responsible for the survival of a vast number of plants we need to live: from grasses for livestock, to fruits, nuts, and vegetables.  Time to appreciate them more, as the ancients did.
“SI SAPIS, SIS APIS.”
As the ancient Romans used to say, “If you would be wise, be a bee.”

For more sources and details, see the “Dig deeper” link with this blog, plus the bibliography in the Mellify book. Also forthcoming: a full bibliography of the Alex saga.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 9:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.