Beekeeping lore says that edible honey in pots and in comb has been found in Pharaohs’ tombs. Really?

Fiona told us at dinner last week that chewing tobacco is laced with glass chards so users get a faster nicotine uptake through their macerated cheek lining. I had absolutely no desire to bust this myth because it’s such a wonderfully gross deterrent. I was tempted to say, “Tobacco companies are brilliant. Almost as smart as beer brewers. You know they dissolve cockroaches in the brew so that drinkers get stronger from all the bug protein, and have more stamina.” But I didn’t, because lying is bad. And I’m trying to teach them to question some of outrageous things they hear.

Like most of my parenting initiatives, this one backfired. I walked into the kitchen while Fiona was baking cookies and found Myles assuming various poses all of which placed his butt perilously close to the oven’s heat element. As entertaining as his inside-out Sylvia Plath reinterpretation was, I had to call an end to it for fear of him searing his cheeks, and ask him what, exactly, he was doing. He explained he was investigating the rumor he heard that  farts are flammable — a hot topic among the 5th grade boys. I suggested a safer route might be to use a lighter.

“We tried,” he said.  ”It’s out of propane. Where are the matches?”

Apparently they’d been at this for awhile. I suggested they see if Mythbusters had ever filmed an episode testing the hypothesis. The dudes accept emails, so I sent them this:

Suzanne Langlois Less than a minute ago

Hi Guys! My kids are dying to find out if it’s possible to set one’s expelled gaseous air alight. They tell each other, “Hey, I wanna try to torch your farts. So fart.” I’m not the kind of mom who likes my children experimenting on their gluteal epidermis, so I respectfully ask your opinion.

I’ll let you know what they say if they get back to me, which I hope they do because I can’t cook enough beans so satisfy Myles’ curiosity. Then I got to thinking, I repeat some pretty outrageous things without question. Like the notion that edible honey was found in the tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs – a frequently cited anecdote that’s often linked to the assertion that honey lasts forever. I figured those Mythbuster guys would violate all kinds of international laws if they dug up mummies on my behalf, so I took this one on myself.

The first reasonable article I found online was archive of past Wikipedia discussions debating the validity of the honey-in-the-tombs claim, which concluded that sufficient evidence doesn’t exist to support the tale. I continued to Google for far longer than I’ll admit here, and found nearly 60 references to the supposedly edible honey found in various tombs. Some of the stories say the honey was inside honeycomb, some say it was inside various clay pots, but very few source the information. The most credible sounding stories mentioned an archeologist named Theodore Davis. I found what seems like an authentic account he wrote in 1907 describing his discoveries in the Tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu in Valley of the Kings. Guess what? No honey. Davis wrote that he found a vase that contained a substance he first thought was honey, but later was proven to be natron, an embalming preservative. Myth busted!