Honey and Dust -- a quest for honey

A new book Honey & Dust -- Travels in search of sweetness by Piers Moore Ede is about a quest for the world's best honeys.

[After an accident] A stint on an organic farm belonging to a Swiss émigré in northern Italy helped to rebuild Moore Ede's physical strength, but the author also acquired a deep passion for honey from the bee-keeping owner. Moore Ede is more of a bee-keeper manqué than the genuine article, a man more in love with the delicious product and with the symbolism, lore and history of apiculture, than the act of tending bees itself.

... Moore Ede sees honey as the quintessence of this cyclic exchange between man and the natural environment, and also as a food, medicine, energising aphrodisiac and even as a portal to the unconscious, given that some wild forms have almost hallucinogenic properties. By implication honey also stands as the symbolic holy grail for his own restored health.