Buzz Off! How to Beat Local Allergies With Local Honey

Drippy.  Itchy.  Stuffy.  Groggy.  Sound familiar?  If you regularly suffer from springtime allergies, the answer is probably yes.  While loading up on the Claritins, Benadryls, or Zyrtecs is one option, you can also try some local honey.

When bees ingest the nectar from flowers, they’re also ingesting some of the plants’ pollen.  This nectar is later regurgitated by the bees and stored in their honeycombs.  After the bees use their wings to evaporate some of the water from the nectar, honey is created.

While the local honey method has yet to be tested scientifically, the idea behind it seems to make sense: The sweet stuff contains small amounts of pollen from local flowers, and like a vaccine that protects against a virus or disease by providing you with a tiny dose of it, eating local honey is believed to build up the body’s immune system against those allergy-causing pollens.  For the best chance of building up your body’s defenses, take 2-3 spoonfuls of locally-produced honey each day for a couple of months prior to allergy season.  You could eat the honey straight up, but I would take advantage and swirl it into oatmeal, stir it into tea, or drizzle it over a slice of whole grain toast with peanut butter, bananas, and cinnamon.

In addition to being delicious and possibly banishing allergy symptoms, honey is the perfect natural remedy for a whole host of ailments.  Eating a spoonful will soothe a scratchy throat, and mixing it with some baking soda makes for a quick face mask that will draw out the skin’s impurities.  Ayurvedic practice even says that 2 tsp honey combined with 1 tsp garlic juice taken twice daily will get high blood pressure under control.

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