Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
So how honey helps turtles.
I saw a couple of you mention that you were curious what we did with honey in my Kevin Bacon post. Well I'll tell you! It does a lot!
Honey is naturally antimicrobial so fungus, viruses and bacteria can't live in it. That makes it awesome to put on wounds. Then we get the healing properties of something like neosporin or antibiotics, without needing to fear building up antibiotic resistance.
It is also sticky, so we use it in the turtles that are in the water, which helps keep it from coming off. We will combine it with honeycomb to pack deeper wounds and then it works like a wet to dry bandage. The honey pulls all the nasty out and the honeycomb traps it.
The next cool thing it does it produces it's own hydrogen peroxide. When in contact with a wound the chemical make up of the honey combined with the tissue produces hydrogen peroxide which helps clean the wound even more over time.
If a turtle comes in super malnourished and not eating on it's own we also can tube feed it honey to help bring up it's glucose. It doesn't last a long time, but if it can't handle the regular tube feeding formula we usually can get that in them. Then we can start to mix in the other stuff a little at a time until we can get them the regular stuff.
Lastly, it's dirt cheap. The silver products that we use are wicked expensive, but honey is super cheap. We work with local bee keepers and they donate it to us, and it's also not unusual to have kids convince their parents to pick some up at the grocery store to send along. For boat strikes that involve the lungs or other organs we will get sterile medical grade honey, but most times we can use the regular stuff.
So that's the story with honey! Told you it was a lot! Go have some honey for a snack and the next time you get cut try some under your band-aid!
Re: So how honey helps turtles.
I was going to ask does it work the same with wounds on turtles as it does on humans? Like, if it mixed with our tissue would it still produce hydrogen peroxide and all that good stuff?
Who knew honey could do so much and still be pretty darn tasty LOL
Sure does, it is on open wounds (cuts, scrapes, burns etc) that it produces the hydrogen peroxide, not just regular uninjured skin. It was actually used in human medicine first before we started using it in turtles. It goes way back to egyptian times, and the sterile stuff we get is designed for human medicine, we just kidnap it. :-p
It's pretty amazing stuff!