There is no doubt honey is nutritious and delicious food. Bees work hard to provide us with honey and its different products like organic honey and pure honey. But the thing that makes honey truly astonishing is how it's made. The existence of bees is committed to taking care of their colonies. Each honey bee has some work, and that work needs to be finished so the colony can flourish. And the way through which honey bees protect their hives is by honey creation and storage.
Honey making is surely an amazing process. But the real question is, how do bees make honey. Read this article to find out how do bees make honey.
How do bees make honey?
The process of honey-making requires multiple steps. We enjoy honey without realizing how much bees have to work to provide us with organic honey or pure honey. Let's find out how do bees make honey. Following are the steps that honey bees make to produce this precious food.
- Collecting nectar from flowers
Collecting nectar is the first for making organic honey. Finding nectar is the job of worker bees. Worker bees can travel for four miles in search of pollen and nectar. They frequently visit more than a hundred flowers to get nectar. They start their work when they find out a good source of nectar. They suck up the nectar from the flowers using their proboscis. Honey bees have an extra special stomach called honey stomach where they store honey like the kangaroo pouch where they store their baby. Nectar, along with the bee's saliva stored in the honey stomach. Enzymes in the honey stomach also start reacting with nectar changing its properties. Worker bees get back to their hives once the honey stomach is full. Worker bees job is finished once they pass the nectar to the house bees.
- Pass nectar to house bees
In the hives, house bees wait for worker bees to return and so that they can start their work. When the worker bees return to their hives, they pass the nectar to the house bees. House bees start the actual organic honey production process. When nectar is being passed from worker bees to house bees, it is chewed, and its chemical properties and pH change. At this step, the nectar mixture contains too much water and can not be stored in winter. Bees work on dehydrating nectar mixture in the next step.
- Bees dry out the honey
When nectar is passed from one bee to another, some water is eliminated from it. And different another step to dehydrate the honey is by spreading the honey over the honeycomb. This method expands the surface region, which results in more water evaporation. Another step that bees utilize to dry out honey is that they fan their wings over organic honey. This process expands airflow and dissipates more fluid. After this method, water availability in organic honey is decreased from seventy per cent to twenty per cent. Bees work a lot for the whole honey-making process.
- Cap the honey on the honeycomb
The last step in organic honey production is storage. Bees deposit the honey into honeycomb cells. They keep it there until it is ready to eat. Every cell of the honeycomb is capped with beeswax, which keeps organic honey fresh. Beeswax is another fascinating product made by honey bees that are utilized in many products such as candle wax and many beauty products. Honey deposited in honeycomb makes the walls of the hive warm, which help bees survive in the winter season. Honey bees also use that honey to feed their young ones. This process will discuss in the next step.
- Using the honey
Honey bees utilize honey to feed the larvae in early summer and spring. This process helps them increase their workforce up to fifty thousand bees in summer. Then these worker bees work throughout summer to collect nectar from flowers to survive the winter. Twelve honey bees work their whole life to make a teaspoon of organic honey. We underestimated honey and took it for granted without realizing how do bees make honey. Next time when you use organic honey in your food, think about a hundred bees that made it possible for you to enjoy this delicious food.
Why do bees make honey?
Bees are intelligent and smart species. They work throughout summer and spring in collecting pollen and nectar and making honey which helps them survive in winter. Bees cannot survive without a hive in the winter season. There is also a shortage of food in the winter season. Honey bees make organic honey as much as possible in warmer months which help them in colder months. They use the honey to feed their young ones in winter, which will grow till summer, and help gather pollen and nectar for the colony.
Some interesting facts about honey bees
- There are only seven types of bees that can make honey. Not every bee can make honey. Honey bees gather pollen and nectar in the warm season to make honey they store until the cold season.
- Honey bees have a shorter lifespan; they live for only six weeks, one worker bee can make one-twelfth of a teaspoon in its whole lifetime.
- One jar of organic honey, which is 16oz, is the work of 1152 bees.
- One worker bee visits more than a hundred flowers during one visit to search for pollen and nectar.
- Honey bees also feed on their honey. A typical bees colony can eat up to one or two hundred pounds of honey.
- Honey bees can travel up to four miles searching for flowers to get pollen and nectar.
- In order to make one pound of honey, bees travel roughly fifty-five thousand miles.
- Honey bees navigate through the position of the sun. They also rely on the earth's magnetic field to get direction.
- Honey bees can see the sun even with the cloud or bad weather because their eyes are sensitive to polarized light, making it easy for them to recognize the sun.