I'm sitting in a little restaurant in Key Largo and they've got this brochure with bee information for some reason, and according to it, beehives are "the most sterile place in nature." So I did some research while I waited for my muffins and found this article about propolis. Very interesting.
Honey is anti-microbial and anti-bacterial, too. At least the real stuff is. That's one of the complaints that honey vendors in the US have - there are no standards for anything but sugar content for foreign honey so most of the sue-bee shit you buy at the grocery store is nothing but glucose and food coloring. The real stuff is halfway to neosporin.
Just FYI - a lot of the lauded anti-bacterial qualities of honey come into play when it is used as a salve, not when taken internally. Honey is good to use on wounds, esp. burns, because the high sugar content drains fluids from the wound by osmotic pressure (making an unpleasant environment for bacteria), and also it supplies simple sugars which can be absorbed and used as nutrients by healing tissues below. Some types of NZ honey (manuka) have an additional benefit labelled "UMF", which is extra-anti-bacterial, apparently. Manuka (also called "tea tree" here) has a strong flavour; I'm not fond of it myself. A little piney-tasting. It's a common tree here, similar to Texas mesquite.
It's related. The NZ manuka tree is this : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptospermum_scoparium The wood is nice to use for smoking (especially fish), and it's good for firewood; although the trees are small, the word is very hard and burns long. The Aussie melaleuca is a different species. I'm not familiar with it.