Honey is a simple pleasure. It's to easy to forget, while enjoying its luxurious fragrant sweetness on a slice of buttered toast, that honey is made by bees and is the end-product of a sophisticated production line and thousands of skilled workers.
How do bees make honey?
How do bees get nectar back to the hive so they can start making honey?
Honey starts out as nectar, a rather dilute solution of various sugars that flowering plants produce to attract pollinating insects.
Most of these visitors drink it down on the spot as sustenance for themselves. A foraging worker bee, though, does things differently.
After sucking it out of the flower with its straw-like proboscis, the bee deposits the nectar in its proventriculus or honey stomach.
This can hold a lot of nectar – up to almost half the bee’s unloaded body mass – and filling it may require a thousand flower visits. The transformation of nectar into honey begins while the bee is still on the wing, as the proventriculus produces enzymes that break down the larger, complex sugar molecules into smaller ones.
What happens to the nectar when the bee returns to the hive?
On arrival back at the hive, the forager unloads its cargo by regurgitating the sugary solution to other workers, who pass it back and forth between each other, adding more enzymes each time and frothing it up with their mouthparts to encourage the evaporation of water.
What happens to the honey in the honeycomb?
Once it is sufficiently sticky and viscous, the concoction is laid down in the beeswax cells of the honeycomb and the workers continue the drying process by fanning it with their wings.
Only when the water content has been reduced to about 18 per cent (from about 75 per cent in the original nectar), do they seal the cells with beeswax lids. At this point, it is well and truly honey.
Why do bees make honey?
While pollen provides the colony with most of its protein and nutrient needs, honey is its primary source of sugar. Crucially, the stored honey serves as a stockpile to see it through the unproductive winter months.
Unlike wasp and bumblebee colonies, which die off at the end of the summer, honeybees overwinter within the hive.
Honey is an ideal long-term store of energy because it has an exceptionally long shelf-life. Pots from ancient Egyptian tombs have been found to contain honey that is supposedly perfectly edible. The high concentrations of sugar make for a hostile environment for yeasts and bacteria that might cause it to spoil. Its life span is extended further by one of the enzymes produced by the proventriculus, which generates hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid, both of which are toxic to microbes.
How much honey do bees make?
An average hive produces about 11kg of honey in a season, which requires the foragers to fly over 1.5 million kilometres between them. A standard jar of honey requires about 80,000km. The sheer effort that has gone into making honey is worth remembering when spreading it onto toast – it can surely only add to the pleasure.