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How do Bees Make Honey

Most of us have asked ourselves, “How do bees make honey?” If you’ve never found out, it’s a fascinating process.

Honeybees are social insects who live in colonies. Inside their hive are several wax honeycombs that contain numerous cells that the bees use for rearing babies and storing food. Bees are amazingly organized, devoting themselves to the survival and well-being of their colony.

Three castes make up the bee colony: the queen, worker bees, and drones. The queen is the mother of the colony. She lays eggs from which all the bees develop. Drones’ sole function is to fertilize the virgin queen bees, and worker bees perform all the necessary tasks of the colony. A colony may contain 40,000 to 80,000 worker bees and several hundred drones. In the winter, a colony contains 10,000 to 20,000 worker bees, but no drones.

Bee lifespans depend on when in the year they are born, with spring and summer bees living for about six weeks, and those born in September or later living at least six months. Spring and summer bees do a lot of work and expend a lot of energy, while those born in autumn are inactive within the hive during wintertime, eating up the stored food.

A worker bee emerges from her birth cell as a mature bee, spending the first three weeks of life in the hive as a nurse bee, cleaning cells, feeding older and baby bees, feeding the queen, building the combs, storing nectar, sealing cells, getting rid of dead bees and debris, ventilating the hive and guarding the hive’s entrance. She spends the second three weeks of life as a forager, collecting nectar, pollen, water, and propolis (similar to sap).

Bees eat honey and pollen. Honey, made from flower nectar, provides bees with carbohydrates for energy. The pollen, from flower anthers, provides vitamins, minerals, and protein.

So how do bees make honey? It is made by the foraging bees. Every day, all day, they diligently pursue plants and trees at a distance of up to 5 km from the hive for nectar, which they collect from flowers. Nectar contains anywhere from 20% to 60% sugar, and the rest is made of water, organic acids, minerals, pigments, vitamins, and aromatic chemicals. Bees collect nectar from spring through autumn.

Foragers and nurse bees do the actual honey-making. The forager bee collects nectar, storing it in a special bodily sack. To fill the sack, the bee may visit up to 150 flowers, depending on species. Just a few citrus flowers can provide enough nectar, but clover requires hundreds of flowers for enough nectar to fill the bee’s honey sack. A forager may take hours to collect enough nectar to take back to the hive.

The bee’s body makes an enzyme called invertase and adds it to the honey sack as she returns to the hive. It breaks down the plant sugars into simpler sugars like fructose and glucose.

In the hive, house bees take the nectar and store it in the cells of the honeycomb. There, water evaporates from the nectar, with house bees helping the process by fanning their wings in front of the cells. This converts the nectar into honey. When honey is ripened, it has 17% to 20% water content. Enzymes are added by the bees to prevent fermentation and bacterial attack.

When the process is done, the house bees cover the top of each cell with a thin film of beeswax, making it airtight. Then they move to the next empty comb and start the process over.

The typical bee colony can make up to 50 kg of surplus honey each year! This requires visits to some 4 million flowers for every one kilogram of honey. Honeys vary depending on the types of flowers that were used in the making of the honey. Color, thickness, and flavor may be quite different from one honey to the next.

Honeybees collect and store nectar as long as nectar is available and there are empty cells available for storage, meaning they can make far more honey than they can consume. Modern beekeeping methods emphasize overproduction of honey so that honey can be harvested for human consumption while leaving plenty to keep the colony healthy and functioning.