On Food and Cooking

also from fruits, resins, and even carrion and
excrement — sources that make for
unhealthful honeys as well as rich and strange
flavors. European colonization brought a
fundamental change to North America by
introducing, around 1625, the bee that
produces practically all the honey in the world
today, Apis mellifera.
Bees are social insects that have evolved
along with nectar-producing flowering plants.
The two organisms help each other out: plants
provide the insects with food, and insects
carry cross-fertilizing pollen from one flower
to another. Honey is the form in which flower
nectar is stored in the hive. It appears from
the fossil record that bees have been around
for some 50 million years, their social
organization for half that time. Apis, the
principal honey-producing genus, originated
in India. Apis mellifera, the honey bee proper,
evolved in subtropical Africa and now
inhabits the whole of the Northern