How do bees make honey?

Honey is one of the most amazing natural products on earth but bees do need help to make it! Not, as you may think, from beekeepers or farmers, but from plants that produce nectar. It's not something we might always consider at first but without plants, bees could not produce any honey at all. This is where the process of making honey always begins, with the flowers in our gardens, the wild flowers in the hedgerows and the blossom in the trees. Without plants starting the 'manufacturing' process, there would be no such thing as honey as bees cannot make honey without this essential and primary ingredient!

Where it all begins.

All honey starts as nectar, it's essentially just sucrose (a type of sugar) that's dissolved in water. Plants produce it to provide energy for visiting pollinators like honeybees. A bee can visit thousands of flowers in a single day collecting this sugary substance. Bees have a straw like tongue called a proboscis that they use to get down into the flower to suck the nectar out. A honeybee will either drink the nectar for an 'energy drink' boost, or it will store it in their second stomach often called a 'honey stomach' which is an extra tummy for storing nectar to take back to the hive. As the bee sucks up the nectar the bee adds an enzyme that will break the sucrose down into the simple sugars glucose and fructose within the honey stomach as the bee continues to collect nectar. A single bee will visit up to a thousand individual flowers collecting nectar to completely fill its honey stomach. Only once their honey stomach is full, will the bee return to the hive.

Back to the hive.

When honeybees arrive back at the hive the next part of the honey making process can continue. This is done by passing the nectar orally from one bee to another. Every time the nectar passes to another bee, it mixes with more enzymes, one of which reacts with some of the glucose to produce hydrogen peroxide that helps to destroy bacteria. As the nectar is passed from bee to bee, it will evaporate a little more of the water content of the nectar so it will start to thicken and move it a little closer to becoming the honey we know and love - but we aren't quite there yet!

Filling the honeycomb.

When it’s concentrated enough, the bees will start to fill all the individual cells in an empty honeycomb. Other worker bees have been working tirelessly to construct all these little storage hexagonal units from beeswax! Once the comb is full, it will still need to be dehydrated further, to reduce the water content even more.

Drying out process.

The bees fan the full honeycomb with their wings to encourage more evaporation from the honey. All that energy produced creates heat and their wings create air movement, so it's like a bee fan heater! The bees will do this night and day until the honey is ready. If you were to stand near the bee hive during this process you would hear the loud hum of all the bees vibrating their bodies and wings! Honeybees appear to instinctively know when the honey is ready and will do this drying out process for just the right amount of time, every time.

Protecting the honey.

When the honey is ready the bees will cap off the cells using beeswax lids. The bees create the wax themselves from inside from their abdomen. Now the honey is fully enclosed in wax protecting it from being damaged, just like the lid on our jars of honey! The capped honey is protected from absorbing more moisture and bacteria. It also keeps the honey protected from all the little bees feet running around inside the beehive! In this state the bees can store the honey for as long as needed.

Harvesting the honey (carefully!)

The ability to store honey like this also means that honeybees don't need to hibernate as these honey stores will provide all the energy they need to survive winter and raise a new generation of honeybees. Fortunately for us, a healthy hive full of honey bees can make a lot more honey than the colony needs so we can harvest some of this honey for ourselves! Beekeepers must be careful towards the end of the year not to harvest too much and to ensure that the bees have enough honey for the winter, taking too much could kill the colony so it's something beekeepers are very careful about. Most honey is taken from the hive during spring and early summer so the bees will have plenty of time to collect more nectar and create more honey before winter sets in.

From those first tiny drops of nectar in the flower to the finished product stored in the beehive it is untouched by human hands. Honeybees put a lot of 'bee-hours' into making the honey we enjoy every day. It's a process that's been going on for a very long time, where bees and flowers have formed this very special relationship. If you want to know more about that then check out our blog The History of Bees  where we explore how bees and flowers evolved to help each other!