Honey Tales

Bee Charmer

Not one person who has seen Fried Green Tomatoes will think of anything else but Idgie’s love for Ruth and how she wanted to impress her by getting a honeycomb directly from the hive.

“You’re just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode.

That’s what you are, a bee charmer.”

Honey in Birth

Honey has a great supply of natural sugars and most midwives had honey of some sort on hand, whether in the Honey Bear…

…or Honey Sticks.

…or some Honey Lollipops.

If a woman’s energy was waning, a couple of spoonfuls of honey or 2 or 3 sticks, could perk her back up for awhile more… even if she was unable to eat or drink much else, honey was a great pick-me-up.

Honey has antimicrobial properties, it is a hydrogen peroxide thing, and there is a lot of research showing honey, Manuka Honey in particular, used on infections can help heal the wound quicker… and without the risk of medication interactions/allergies. Honey is often used on diabetic ulcers, it being more effective than many other treatments.

New Use for Honey (for me)

So, I kind of knew this, but when I was an intern midwife in San Diego, I got to see the range of what home birth midwives do with honey.

Mind you, by the time I was interning as a midwife in San Diego, I had been in birth for over 20 years and had gone to hundreds of births in hospitals, birth centers and at home. Over the years, I would see things done I had never heard of before, but could usually be shown the research about it.

Honey was often used in the way I mentioned above; for energy.

So when a woman’s perineum tore at birth and said she did not want to be sutured, I was pretty shocked (every woman who had ever torn in my experience was sutured, it wasn’t ever a consideration not to be). When the midwives acted as if this was a normal thing, choosing no stitches, I was baffled. When they pulled out the plastic Honey Bear and grabbed a spoon from the family utensil drawer, I blinked.

Honey was spread onto the back of the spoon, the woman’s legs opened a bit and the honey “painted” on the tear, all the while the “antibiotic” properties of honey explained. She was instructed to keep her legs together except to put more honey on it.

I’m not kidding.

I still cannot find medical research showing honey’s aid in normal healing of a perineal or vulvar tear; it remains a midwife’s tale that it does anything at all. (This is different than an infected wound, where the research is copious.) Many midwives, myself included, believe it was keeping the legs together that did much more to heal the tear than the honey.

Medical Grade Honey

But, if it did do something, wouldn’t you want Medical Grade Honey (MGH) slathered on your open wound instead of honey the family is using in their morning tea? In fact, research shows that regular table honey has potentially pathogenic organisms compared to MGH.

I mean new parents know to never give their infants honey because they might have spores of a bacterium called Clostridium botulinum. Wouldn’t that follow that it might not be the best thing for a perineum?

Here is a medical grade honey-gauze that might have been an okay thing for an open wound.

Or perhaps a tube only used only on your body and no one else’s?

Honeycombs

I remember when my dad (whom I am missing so very much lately) would bring us miel (honey) in the comb from the Cuban store. I loved biting into the wax, feeling the honey ooze out of the tiny openings, then chewing the wax like gum. I wonder if my kids have ever had that experience.

Miel. One of the best Spanish words in existence.

A Recent Conversation

“I had some cereal and some honey.”

That’s what he said.

“You put honey in cereal? With milk? That’s pretty gross.”

“No, cereal without milk and honey separate.”

“You were spooning honey into your mouth?”

“No I was using a fork and dipping it into the honey and eating it.”

Now I was really on high alert.

“You are telling me that you put a fork into the honey, suck the honey off… then put the fork back into the honey and do it again?”

“Uh, yeah. Why?”

“You are telling me you double, triple and quadruple dip your fork into a communal honey jar?”

“I never thought of it that way before. It never occurred to me.”

Maybe, knowing what I do now about honey’s medicinal properties, it might not be the grossest thing after all.

(Happy Birthday!)