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I’ve always viewed honey as a baking ingredient or kitchen condiment, and it never occurred to me that this sticky, amber-yellow substance would have many uses beyond food. In fact, real honey contains medicinal and healing properties for a whole range of medical conditions, from athlete’s foot to liver problems.

In Silang, Cavite is a honey farm that produces not just extra virgin honey, but a wide range of honey-based products for all sorts of ailments. As part of the Verdana Gateway Tour, we were lucky to be taken around the facilities of Ilog Maria Honeybee Farms and have front-row seats to their honey production process and see the measures they take to ensure that they come up with nothing less than unfiltered, unprocessed, and unadulterated honey.

Ilog Maria Virgin Honey is produced by Italian honeybees who collect nectar from avocado, sunflower, mango, coffee, citrus, fruit trees, and wildflowers. A 500 gram bottle of honey is made out of the nectar from over 5 million flowers. Who knew that bees were such hard workers? It takes around eight weeks for honey to ripen in the beehives. Once eight weeks have passed, the bee farmers choose only the ripest honeycombs for the best honey. The honey is then bottled and sealed to preserve its nutrients and healing properties.

Besides its medicinal uses, the Ilog Maria Virgin Honey also has a distinct flavor you might never taste again. That’s because they migrate their beehives to different farms every summer so that the bees can collect honey from trillions of different flowers. The texture, taste, and color of the honey bees produce all depends on the kind of flowers they forage, giving you as many as 3 dozen unique and subtle flavors.

To obtain the health benefits of Ilog Maria Virgin Honey, take a tablespoon before breakfast and drink one or two glasses of water a few minutes later. This will help clean your digestive tract.

Ilog Maria’s honey stimulates digestion and can be used as a remedy for respiratory ailments, as well as a salve for fresh wounds or burns. When applied immediately, Ilog Maria honey can also relieve the pain of third degree burns and reduce scarring. You can even use honey as a facial cleanser or to heal acne!

Besides virgin honey, Ilog Maria also manufactures honey-based body products containing bee propolis. The stingless citronella mosquito repellent smells like plant and fruit oils instead of harsh chemicals – great for those who have sensitive skin or who just plain don’t like the smell of commercial insect repellents. The spearmint honey and oatmeal soap is made out of only the purest beeswax, propolis, olive and flower oils and has a pleasant, neutral scent. Finally, the honey propolis throat spray is a strong anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-oxident that freshens breath, eases sore throat, and smoker’s cough.

JOEL and Violaine Magsaysay are the owners of Ilog Maria Honeybee farm. They are just mad about bees. This middle-aged, happily-married couple with four kids has a bee in the bonnet about anything to do with bees, bee keeping, and the wondrous organic health products that can be had from them: virgin honey, honey cider vinegar, bee propolis, bee pollen, royal jelly—even the venom found in the bee’s sting, which has been found to be effective in treating a wide range of ailments from gout and arthritis to multiple sclerosis. ( read more about their story, The Buzz. How Busy-as-bees Couple Finds Health and Happiness )

Violaine Magsaysay with Anton Diaz

For more information about Ilog Maria Virgin Honey and their other products, visit their website at www.ilogmaria.com.

More Photos of Ilog Maria

Contact:

Ilog Maria Farms

Silang, Cavite

(046) 865-0018

Tags: honey