How Bees Make Honey

Honey bees alone have unique ability make honey. They do this by traveling to flowers up to 3 miles away from their hive to gather a dilute sugar water called nectar that flowers offer to entice bees to visit. Bees pickup pollen grains on tiny hairs all over their bodies. These hairs are what makes honeybees different from more the aggressive wasps, yellow jackets and hornets. When bees visit other flowers some of the pollen falls off and fertilizes those flowers allowing them to produce fruit and seeds.

Bees return to the hive with the nectar and even some pollen weighing almost as much as its own body weight. The nectar is passed between several bees. In the process, the nectar is changed from a single type of sugar into two new sugars, making honey more sweet and allowing more sugars to dissolve into the honey. The bees place the not quite honey in honeycomb cells. To complete the process the bees then reduce the amount of water thru evaporation by fanning their wings to preserve honey. Lastly they cap the honey filled cells with wax to store until the colony may need it.

Because if it’s low water content and high acidity (it doesn’t taste that way tho because of the sweetness), honey is incredible inhospitable to microorganisms like bacteria and viruses. Honey contains 180 different substances, include 40 organic compounds that give each type of honey its unique smell and taste.