How bees make honey : simple and detailed explanation. Also useful for explaining to children how bees live and how the pollination process occurs during the collection of nectar.
When you prepare a recipe at home, you get all the ingredients. To make a dessert, you buy milk and flour… but what are the basic ingredients of honey? What is it made of and above all, how do bees make honey? We will try to answer you exhaustively.
It all starts with flowers. If flour and milk are the basic ingredients for your cake, pollen and nectar are the starting ingredients for making honey, but they are not enough on their own.
Bees and flowers
Bees are attracted to flowers by their scents. Once on the flower, the bee collects nectar. In reality, plants produce scented nectars precisely to attract pollinating insects (pollinators) and start a collaboration that is beneficial for both.
Bees, by visiting flowers, become unaware carriers of pollen . Pollen is the male germinal element that, when it reaches the right flower, will give rise to pollination. This is how plants far from each other allow the pollination of flowers and produce fruit.
It is for this same reason that someone said “If bees disappeared the planet would have 4 years of life”, without pollination there would be no crops. Without bees plants would not be able to produce fruit.
It is true that bees are not the only pollinating insects: butterflies also work for pollination, as do many other hymenoptera. It is also true that bees are among the few insects that survive even when plants are in vegetative rest. If butterflies have a life cycle that sees them active only in the summer (when they can feed on nectar), bees survive in colonies even in winter. How? Because they transform that nectar into honey.
Bees make honey for themselves, to use as a food source during the winter. For more information: What do bees eat .Honey serves bees as a stable product to preserve nectar and have a food source always ready for use! So… how do bees make honey?
How Bees Make Honey
The honey production process carried out by bees begins with the collection. Foraging bees collect nectar which is placed in a bag containing enzymes that start an initial transformation process.
If you want to explain to children how bees make honey, you can prepare some jam with him. You will see that on the fire the pulp of the fruit will start to thicken and take on a less fluid consistency: the heat makes the fruit lose its watery component.
Bees do something very similar: they dehydrate nectar. Thanks to the constant movement of the colony, a delicate ventilation process is activated at room temperature.
Nectar, however, is not the only ingredient used by bees to make honey; there is also honeydew. Honeydew is a waste product produced by sap-sucking insects such as aphids, scale insects, and leafhoppers. Bees (as well as ants) collect this waste product because it is a valuable source of sugar.
Starting from the prevalence of the original ingredient, you can obtain: honeydew honey (darker and richer from a nutritional point of view) and nectar honey (more aromatic and with a typical honey yellow color!).
How do you go from nectar to honey?
So far so good, but… how is honey made ? As mentioned, the nectar begins its transformation in the special sac that the bees have (the honey sac). Once in the hive , the foraging bees unload “the booty” and the “hive bees” begin to evaporate the excess water, exposing the droplet of nectar to the warm, dry air of the hive. Thus, the droplet of nectar transforms into a droplet of honey.
Droplet by droplet, the bees fill each cell of the honeycomb . It is in the honeycomb that the maturation process ends (evaporation of the liquid continues) until the honey reaches the color and consistency that we all know. To preserve the honey in the honeycombs , the bees seal each cell with a layer of wax (called operculum).
How to make honey
The explanation just seen is rather reductive: for the production of honey , complex biochemical processes come into play. The nectar is collected, transformed (dehydrated) and combined with substances produced by the bee itself, starting from the sucking apparatus. The operation is also technically complex: numerous exchanges can take place from one bee to another, inside the hive, and this allows a gradual “maturation” and enrichment of enzymes that derive from the glandular secretions of the bees themselves.