Could eating local honey ease seasonal allergies?

NEW YORK (FOX 5 NEWS) - Mickey Hegedus, better known as Mickey the Beekeeper, is a third-generation beekeeper who claims that ingesting a little bit of locally made honey and pollen helps to alleviate seasonal allergies. He says there are a lot more bees this season than previous years because they survived the mild winter.

"Introducing your body to something that it does have a reaction to, and little bits and little bits and little bits help it, I think, immunize itself a little bit to part of the problem," Mickey said.

Dr. Punita Ponda of Northwell Health in Great Neck, Long Island, supports adding a little raw honey to your diet. She did a study on this topic in 2014 with Hofstra medical students. She had patients eat raw honey twice a day throughout the pollen season. About a third of those patients reported their allergies were alleviated. The rest of the group didn't see any change. 

Dr. Ponda said that no scientific evidence backs up the honey diet, but if your allergies are bad, you may have nothing to lose and only a sweet remedy to gain.