Honey is stored in beehives or honeycomb nests, which are double layers of uniform hexagonal cells made of beeswax (protected by worker bees) and propolis (plant resin collected by worker bees).
Honey comes from bees. Bees collect nectar from flowers and return it to their hives. There, the nectar and its sugars are broken down. Meanwhile, the beating of the bees’ wings causes a physical change to occur within the honey that transforms it into the golden gel that humans harvest.
Honey is placed in storage and covered with beeswax until the arrival of new born bees. The resulting jelly-like substance is sealed in the honeycomb’s storage compartment along with fluid from the bee’s abdomen, where it becomes beeswax. When done, the foraging bees seal the honey with beeswax, which is produced by glands in the bees’ abdomens.
Honey bees collect nectar inside the colony and pack it into hexagonal beeswax combs. Once the honey is dry, the honey bees close the cell with a lid made of fresh beeswax, a bit like a jar of honey. The honey bees then turn the nectar into honey by drying the nectar by flapping their wings, creating a warm wind. Forager worker bees want to collect nectar, turn it into honey, and use it as a food source for the colony.
How Bees Go About Producing Honey
Bees are less likely to collect nectar when flowers are in bloom and convert it into honey, which can be stored to feed them during winter when flowers are scarce. In order for bees to produce honey, they pass from flower to flower and use their proboscis to collect nectar and pollen.
When bees visit a flower, they collect carbohydrates from nectar and protein from pollen. The nectar is taken directly from the flower and placed in the bee’s second stomach, called the honey sac. Female “worker bees” produce honey from pollen and nectar, which they collect from plants on furry bodies during pollination.
During spring and summer, worker bees are busy gathering nectar and pollen to store honey for the colder winter months. Bees eat nectar directly from flowers, but they also bring nectar and pollen back to the hive, where the protein- and fat-rich pollen is stored as bee bread and fed to the hive, where the high-energy nectar is processed. Store as honey when the weather is unfavorable for feeding, such as during harsh winters, rainy seasons and dry periods.
To make honeydew honey, worker bees return the honeydew to the hive and treat it the same way as nectar. When the nectar is first added to the cells of the hive, it’s still a bit watery, but the bees are clever enough to remove the remaining water from the honey.
How Bees Process Nectar
The nectar is then placed in a honeycomb to allow the remaining water to evaporate from the nectar. When ready, the nectar is passed from bee to bee by regurgitation until the nectar reaches the comb. The honey bee continues to process the mixture, also concentrating it, removing the nectar contained in the water. The nectar is delivered by one of the bees in the room and then passed from one bee to another by mouth to mouth until its moisture content drops from about 70% to 20%.
Once the humidity drops below 18%, the nectar officially matures into digestible honey and is then sealed in its cell with a wax cap to be used as food during the long winter. Sometimes the nectar is stored directly in the honeycombs before mouth-to-mouth work, because some evaporation is caused by the temperature inside the hive of 32.5 degrees Celsius. When the bees return to the hive, they regurgitate or spit the nectar back into the cells – honeycombs – in the hive specifically designed for honey production.
Once the forager bees reach their hive, the nectar is transferred to honey pots located outside the hive so that other bees have access to the nectar, or transferred directly to the crop of the handler bees. The food bee transfers its nectar to the transport bee, which crawls through the hive to the top where the processing bees store the honey.
The honey bees then store the flower nectar and pollen in what is called the honey bladder (honey stomach) and return to the hive where they transfer the substances from their bladder to the hive bee.
How Bee Social Structure Supports Honey Production
Honey bees live in colonies called hives and fly out of their hives in search of pollen, propolis, and nectar. Honey is usually made from nectar, a sweet liquid secreted by flowers to attract bees and distribute their pollen. The nectar travels down and into the stomach of the honey bee (also called the harvest), where the complex sugars in the nectar begin to break down into simpler sugars so that the nectar remains in liquid form.
Over time, the bees drain the nectar by flapping it with their wings, removing moisture from the nectar, creating the syrupy, sticky honey we know. The bees flap their wings to create extra airflow around the hive cell, helping to dry the nectar even further until it finally reaches the sweet, sticky honey state we know. With the help of a long, straw-like tongue called a proboscis, honey bees suck droplets of nectar from flowers, a special organ that produces nectar is called a nectary.
