My honey contains
pixie dust, golden pixie dust.
The bees pick it up when they're
visiting flowers for nectar and pollen. Not all flowers have pixie
dust, it's found mostly on wild flowers although you will find it on
some garden flowers.
Of course, the
flowers themselves don't produce pixie dust, they just get coated in
it when the fairies start throwing it around. You will know if you
have a fairy-friendly garden, and if you do the bees will be
inadvertently gathering pixie dust.
The pixie dust
content of honey varies enormously. Some mono-floral honeys contain
none, which is hardly surprising as you'll not find fairies in those
monotonous fields of sunflowers or oilseed rape. Wild flower honey
contains lots of pixie dust, but it's easily destroyed.
Pasteurisation ruins
pixie dust when the honey is heated up to 70 degrees or more for a
few minutes to kill of all the yeasts. Ultra-filtration which strips
most of the pollen from honey also removes pixie dust. Most small
scale UK honey producers do neither so there's a good chance your
local honey contains pixie dust.
The problem is that
pixie dust is difficult to quantify because analytical tests destroy
the very thing they are trying to measure. As a result you seldom see
pixie dust mentioned in the contents of honey.
Instead, purveyors
of honey use words like 'full of natural goodness' to indicate its
presence, or they'll refer to 'natural vitamins', 'living enzymes' or
'nutritional elements' – all code for pixie dust.
Pixie dust accounts
for the medicinal properties of honey. It explains why honey is a
powerful immune system booster, a digestive, a tonic, a treatment for
cancer, sore throats, hang-overs, insomnia and of course, hay fever.
Admittedly the scientific evidence is weak, but that's because most
studies failed to use raw wild-flower honey. Anyway science is over-rated; you just have to
believe as Peter Pan says:
All you need is faith and trust... and a little bit of pixie dust!
Sceptics
will doubt my honey contains pixie dust.“If your honey contains
pixie dust why don't your customers fly?”
It's
a ridiculous argument. Of course honey doesn't make you fly. To
get airborne you have to sprinkle pixie
dust, not
eat it!
