What do bees eat : Nectar and pollen are the fresh food that bees collect from flowers. However, bees also eat honey, a substance processed inside the hive.
It is not easy to explain what bees eat without going into specifics: life in the hive is complex. Bees collect pollen, nectar and propolis to transform these raw materials into wax, honey and finally royal jelly. Let’s see in detail what bees eat and what life in the hive is like.
In the article How to make honey we explained that foraging bees, thanks to a specific apparatus and special bags, are able to collect good quantities of nectar and pollen. These substances, once in the hive, are transformed into honey by enzymes that the bees themselves produce. After production, honey is deposited in the cells of the honeycombs. The bees, punctually and diligently, hermetically seal each cell using a layer of wax.
Each hive contains 30,000 to 80,000 bees. Most of these are worker bees. Worker bees are female bees, slightly smaller than the queen bee.
What do bees eat?
Bees have a very active vision: they need a lot of energy to collect pollen and nectar. Nectar is collected from many plants. The honey produced by bees is partly used as food (therefore produced for nourishment by the bees themselves) and partly transformed into beeswax to build the hexagonal cells (the classic honeycomb structure).
Bees are mainly active between spring and summer. It is during this period that they concentrate their energies on collecting pollen, nectar and propolis. While propolis is used to strengthen the bees (it has a structural function) , pollen and nectar serve both as fresh food and as raw material for honey production. Honey, when winter arrives, will be the only food source for bees.
As mentioned, each bee needs a lot of energy. It is not surprising to know that the composition of the various nectars mainly includes substances such as sucrose, glucose, fructose and other carbohydrates. Nectar is also rich in water. For the production of honey, the water present in the nectar (and also in the pollen) is evaporated with careful ventilation also linked to the movement of the bees’ wings.
By feeding and collecting pollen, bees move from flower to flower and also perform an important pollination function. For this reason, hymenoptera, and in particular bees, are considered important pollinating insects (also known as pollinating insects) .
Royal jelly and queen bee
We told you that bees feed on two “fresh” foods such as pollen and nectar and that, at the same time, they produce honey for the production of wax and for the winter feeding of the hive. But what is royal jelly? You have certainly heard of it. In an article dedicated to explaining what bees eat, we could not omit the name royal jelly .
Before undergoing metamorphosis and taking the form we all know, bees are larvae. The larvae begin to feed on nectar and honey from the third day. The name royal jelly comes from the fact that bee larvae feed on royal jelly. However, not all bee larvae feed on royal jelly. Only larvae destined to become Queens can feed on royal jelly. This is why royal jelly is considered a noble food.
In the hive, royal jelly is one of the most valuable products. Bees produce royal jelly by mixing honey, pollen and some salivary enzymes. A hive, if well-kept, during the six months of the warm seasons, can produce up to 500 grams. Yes, a hive that, as we told you, is composed of up to 80,000 specimens, can produce about 83 grams of royal jelly per month.