How Do Bees Make Honey?
Sugar is a foodstuff attractive to most animals. Nectar, which is a sugar solution, is especially attractive to bees. The sugar it contains is mainly sucrose, with fructose and/or glucose but other sugar types can also occur. Bee larvae and adult bees can eat nectar directly but is more commonly processed into honey first. The average water content of nectar is 60% but the water content of honey is about 18%, this means that the bees must remove quite a lot of water from the nectar to turn it into honey. Field bees collect nectar from flowers and bring it back to the hive and deliver it to the house bees. House bees are workers of a certain age who perform particular tasks inside the hive. One of these tasks is to process the nectar and turn it into honey. The first step is to reduce the water content of the nectar to less than 18% to protect the nectar from fermenting yeasts. On receiving nectar from a returning forager, the house bee will retire to a quiet part of the hive and begin
I would explain it in a simple way: Honey bees collect pollen and nectar in the spring when most flowers and plants are in bloom. They use their long, tubelike tongues like straws (called proboscis) to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their stomachs and carry it to the beehive. While inside the bee’s stomach for about half an hour, the nectar mixes with the proteins and enzymes produced by the bees, converting the nectar into honey. The bees then drop the honey into the beeswax comb, which are hexagonal cells made of wax produced by the bees, and repeat the process until the combs are full. To prepare for long-term storage, the bees fan their wings to evaporate and thicken the honey (note: nectar is 80% water and honey is about 14-18% water). When this is done, the bees cap the honeycomb with wax and move on to the next empty comb, starting all over again. So, strictly speaking, bees actually do not create honey. The honey we eat is a plant product, nectar which
1 Bees make honey from nectar, a natural food produced by plants. Honeybees process the nectar into a form that is delicious and can be stored for a long time. Small female honeybees called worker bees take on different parts of the honey business at different times in their lives. 2 Young worker bees are known as house bees. They have the job of building the honeycombs. These little worker bees are ready to work when they are only two weeks old. They produce wax from glands in their bodies. Then they use their feet and their mouthparts to build with the wax. Passing tiny bits of wax from bee to bee, they build the six-sided cells that make up the honeycomb. Bees work at this job for about three weeks. 3 Next, they move up to the job of field bees. Field bees go out to look for nectar. They find nectar in the blossoms of clover, dandelions, berry bushes, and fruit trees. To get the nectar out, they use their long, tube-like tongues and suck the nectar up as if they were using a straw.
Honeybees use nectar to make honey. Nectar is almost 80% water with some complex sugars. In fact, if you have ever pulled a honeysuckle blossom out of its stem, nectar is the clear liquid that drops from the end of the blossom. In North America, bees get nectar from flowers like clovers, dandelions, berry bushes and fruit tree blossoms. They use their long, tubelike tongues like straws to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their “honey stomachs”. Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach. The honey stomach holds almost 70 mg of nectar and when full, it weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill their honeystomachs. The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar onto other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee’s stomach through their mouths. These “house bees” “chew” the nectar for about half an hour. Dur
All bees live on honey, which they make themselves. Only honeybees make honey that people can use. These bees are the only insects which provide food for humans. Bees also make wax to build their nests, and help nature by pollinating flowers as they fly from one to another. Making honey is the most important job of the worker, o
