How Bees Make Honey

While sipping your tea sweetened with honey, have you ever wondered how that amber goodness came to be?  Of course, you know that honeybees had something to do with it. But the exact process? A little fuzzy?

Honeybees are specialists. Nature designed the bodies of worker bees to carry food to the colony, and those bodies begin the process that will eventually transform the flowers’ nectar into honey.

The first step is to gather nectar. Forager honey bees will visit more than a thousand flowers to fill their honey stomachs with just 40 milligrams of nectar. After an hour of foraging, and with a full honey stomach, the bees will return to the hive to unload their cargo. 

Once they arrive, the foragers transfer the nectar from their stomachs to a bee in the hive. When the nectar arrives at the hive, it consists of about 70 to 80 percent water. The foragers transfer the nectar from bee to bee, mouth to mouth, allowing enzymes in their stomachs and salivary glands to break down the sugars in the nectar. Through this process, some of the water in the nectar evaporates.

The bees then place the nectar in honeycomb cells for the final phase before capping. The water content at this point is still too high, so bees will fan the nectar to evaporate water to a content of about 18 percent. The honey is now ready to be capped and stored for the bees’ future use. Or to be extracted by humans to be used to sweeten tea and other foods.

Just a few facts to leave you with to ensure a full appreciation of the amount of work involved by the bees in creating this delicious substance.

To produce a single pound of honey, a colony of bees needs to collectively fly about 55,000 miles, the equivalent of orbiting the earth twice, and visit about two million flowers.

The bees cap the honey with wax, a substance they also produce. And in fact, bees need to consume between 7 and 8 pounds of honey to produce one pound of wax .  

The next time you savor a spoonful of honey, remember the bees’ and the amount of energy and effort it took to get it to your table.

Coast Day at UD!

Stop by our exhibit booth at Coast Day at UD's College of Earth, Ocean and Environment in Lewes on Sunday October 6 from 10:00 to 3:00. Coast Day highlights the many ways that UD works together with organizations such as ours to understand our area's rich environmental resources and to better serve local communities. At our booth you will see honey bees working actively in our Observation Hive, talk with beekeepers, and learn how you can help to protect our bees and other pollinators. The event is free and open to all.