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gwern comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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Medical grade honey! I can't wait until I can get this stuff in bulk.
How honey kills bacteria
I'm just wondering - what makes medical-grade honey medical-grade (as opposed to food-grade)?
The price ?
Medical-grade honey is purer, sterilized, and made from tea tree nectar. It is a better antibiotic, both because of the sterilization and because it has more of the active ingredient than ordinary tea tree honey, probably because they put more effort into preventing the bees from eating anything else.
'tea tree nectar'? I'm a little confused - I thought honey by definition always came from bees.
I'll presume you aren't making a joke since you used the lesswrong keyword 'confused'.
What do bees eat?
Flower nectar, I had always thought. I did think to myself, 'maybe what is meant is honey harvested from bees feed exclusively on the flowers of tea trees', but leaving aside my similar difficulty with the term 'tea tree' and how one would arrange that (giant sealed greenhouses of tea trees and bee hives?), I couldn't seem to find anything in a quick Google to confirm or deny this - 'tea tree honey' is a pretty rare term and mostly got me useless commercial hits.
The link I gave said "manuka" rather than "tea tree." If you want to know how beekeepers control the inputs, the term is monofloral honey. This is quite common, though a higher price for medical grade honey might lead to more involved methods.
Put the box in the middle of a large forest of tea trees and kill any other plant that bears flowers nearby. Bees are quite efficient optimisers, they'll take low hanging fruit tree blossom if it is available.