How Do Honey Bees Make Honey?
Honey is a simple food, pure and delicious, but how honey bees make it is marvelously complex.
2,000,000 Flowers for a Pound of Honey
To make one pound of honey, honey bees may collect nectar from two million or more flowers. The amount of honey that a single honey bee can produce in her lifetime is tiny, less than one-tenth of a teaspoon. For each pound of honey, it might take the dedicated work of more than 1,000 honey bees, each visiting 2,000 flowers.
All Foragers are Female
All the honey bees that forage for nectar and pollen are female, as is the queen and most of the other bees in the colony. Usually less than 20 percent are males, which are called drones. While drones do not forage, nor maintain the hive, nor take care of brood, they do serve the important purpose of mating with queens from other colonies and providing genetic diversity.
How Do Honey Bees Collect Nectar?
Honey bees have a long flexible tongue called a proboscis that they extend like a straw to suck up nectar from a flower. They can visit hundreds of flowers on a single foraging trip. While foraging, they store the nectar inside their bodies in a special organ called a honey crop. Although sometimes called the honey stomach, the honey crop only stores nectar and is separated from the bee’s digestive system.
How is Nectar Made into Honey?
Nectar contains mostly water and sugar. These sugars are mostly sucrose (table sugar), fructose, and glucose. The type of flower will dictate how much sugar is in the nectar as well as the taste and aroma of honey varietals such as sweet clover, orange blossom, wildflower, and Texas specialties like mesquite and huajillo.
While collecting nectar, the honey bee adds enzymes to break down complex sugars, like sucrose into fructose and glucose, making them more digestible.When the honey bee returns to the hive, she transfers the nectar in her honey crop to other bees by regurgitating. While some describe this as bee spit or vomit, this isn’t correct because it is merely nectar stored in the bee’s body, it doesn’t come from the bee’s digestive system, and it isn’t gross like spit or vomit.
To become honey, a lot of water has to be evaporated from the nectar. Part of the evaporation occurs as the bees transfer nectar back and forth and it loses a bit of its water each time it is exposed to air. When the water content has been reduced to about 20%, the honey is placed in honey comb cells. Before capping a cell with wax, the bees will evaporate even more water until the water content is about 18%. They do this by ventilating the hive, creating air currents by fanning their wings.
Why Do Honeys Have Different Colors and Taste?
The taste and color of honey depends on the source of nectar. Although nectar is almost all water and sugars, it contains tiny amounts of many other compounds that give honey its aroma and flavor. Color can range from very light to very dark. Generally, lighter honeys have a milder taste than darker ones.
Why Does Honey Crystallize? Is it Bad?
The sugars in honey can turn into crystals, which make the honey solidify. Honey is composed mostly of two sugars, fructose and glucose, and glucose is more likely to crystallize. Honeys that are made from nectars that are higher in glucose are more likely to crystallize. Colder temperatures will also promote crystallization. Crystallization only changes the structure of the honey, so honey that is crystallized is not spoiled and it can be used the same as liquid honey.