How do bees make honey?

When we say "bees," we're usually talking about the European Apis mellifera (honey bee). For thousands of years, humans have craved for its honey and benefited from its pollination abilities. But have you ever wondered, how do they produce the honey? What all do they do to produce honey and why do they make the honey? Here in this article, I will answer all these questions, so let’s get started.

Types of bees in a hive

You're undoubtedly already aware of the most significant ingredient in honey production: nectar. A colony of honeybees can visit 50 million flowers per day, and each colony can have up to 60,000 bees. They aren't known as "busy bees" for nothing! Honey bees make group to determine where the best blossoms are. They interact with one another through bumps, noises, and even waggle dance movements.
Depending on their age, all bees have varied roles throughout their lives. There are four types of bees i.e. Queen, worker bees and drones. The queen stays in the hive and produce eggs, drones are male bees meant to fertilize the queen bee to produce more and more eggs. Lastly, worker bees are the ones who collect nectar and produce wax. Honey bees fly up to 5 kilometers in search of blossoms and sweet nectar to make honey. They usually visit around 50 to 100 flowers on each journey.

How do bees make Honey?  

Honey is made up primarily of nectar, which is also the primary source of energy for bees. Honey bees sip nectar droplets from the flower's specific nectar-making organ, called the nectary, with a thin straw-like tongue called a proboscis. When nectar reaches the honey stomach of a bee, the stomach starts to break down the nectar's complex sugars into simpler sugars that are less likely to crystallize, or solidify. This is referred to as "inversion." When a worker honey bee comes to the colony, it delivers the nectar to a house bee, a younger bee (between 12 and 17 days old).  House bees collect nectar inside the colony and store it in hexagon-shaped beeswax nectar cells. They then use the warm breeze created by their wings to dry the nectar and turn it into honey.
Once the nectar has dried, they use fresh beeswax to create a lid for the honey cell, resembling a small honey jar. The honeybees can open this lid and share the honey they collected in the winter when the flowers have finished blooming and there isn't as much nectar accessible.

Honey bees and pollination

Furthermore, bees do not collect nectar solely for the purpose of producing honey. They collect pollen when bees visit flowers, which is an excellent source of protein that helps them stay healthy and robust. Pollen is a powder that flowering plants, trees, and grasses produce (and must disseminate) in order to encourage more of the same species to grow nearby. Pollen can be disseminated in a variety of ways, including by being blown around by wind or being transported between two plants by an insect. Bees aid flower pollination by transporting pollen between blossoms. These are frequently transformed into the seeds of the fruits and nuts we consume. In reality, bees pollinate nearly a third of the food that we eat.

Pollinators are found all around the world

Did you know that the yellow-hairy honey bee is one of the 20,000 bee species of the world? There are about 1,700 in Australia alone, with some of them capable of producing honey. Some common honey bee species are:
•    Tetragonula carbonaria & Austroplebeia australis, two native stingless bees found alone in Australia, produce honey as well.
•    There are several other honey bee species found in various parts of the world, including the gigantic honey bee (Apis dorsata) in Nepal & Indonesia that lives on the tops of cliffs and big trees.
•    Eastern honey bee (Apis cerana) is found in Southeastern Asia and widely maintained by beekeepers in rural areas.

How do bees make honey: The detailed process  

●    Honey starts out as nectar.

Flowers create this sugary liquid to entice insect pollinators to visit. Nectar is made up of 70% to 80% water and a blend of three sugars: sucrose, glucose, and fructose, as well as some aroma, compounds to attract bees to the flowers.

●    Taking a sip of the nectar and storing it

Honeybees drink nectar through their hollow proboscis and store it in the proventriculus, the first chamber of their stomach. Invertase is an enzyme that breaks down sucrose into fructose and glucose units. Other enzymes help destroy germs by increasing the acidity of the nectar.

●    Returning to the beehive

Bees have one of the highest output power rates in the animal kingdom and can carry up to half their own weight. This allows them to forage up to 5 kilometres away from the hive, but at this distance, the majority of the nectar payload is utilized for the return flight.

●    The beehive

Forager bees regurgitate nectar back into the hive. It's then mouth-to-mouth transmitted amongst worker bees to reduce its water levels. Mould and bacteria can't thrive when the water content drops below 18%, so the nectar turns to honey, which the honeybees push into wax chambers.

●    Making use of honey

The bee colony uses all of its honey to nourish the larvae in the spring and early summer, increasing its workforce to 50,000 bees in the summer. These workers then spend the next two to three weeks frantically collecting nectar to last them through the winter. A spoonful of honey requires the lifetime labor of 12 bees.

How much honey does a bee make?

In its lifespan, the average worker bee produces just approximately 1/12 teaspoon of honey. During the peak nectar gathering season, a vigorous, healthy hive usually have a population of approximately 50,000 bees.

Conclusion

Sometimes digging deep into a natural phenomenon can reveal some astonishing facts and realities just like what we have read about honey generation by bees. While we think of nature to be following a hit and trial trajectory in the matter of evolution, it stays ready to reveal some patterns which can show such patterns as if somebody has designed it on purpose. One thing worth noting here is many times people think of honey to be bee vomit which is not true. Honey is just a product of pre digestion process occurring inside bee’s body. One tablespoon of honey and such an amazing and complex machinery behind it makes it worth contemplating.

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