CATDOLL : CATDOLL: How do bees make honey?

How do bees make honey?

How bees make honey

Methods/Steps

1

Bees make honey on their own, and there is a clear division of labor among them, but the process is still very complicated, and it takes about a hundred times of swallowing and spitting to turn it into honey.

2

The bees in a bee colony have a strict division of labor. A small number of worker bees specialize in finding nectar sources. After finding the nectar source, they will lead a large number of bees to collect it. The bee has two stomachs in its body. After sucking the nectar, it will store it in its stomach, and then spit it into an empty honeycomb when it returns to the hive.

3

After bees collect pollen and nectar during the day, they will start the real work of making honey at night. They will suck out the nectar stored in the workshop, mix it in their stomach, and then spit it out. They will repeat this cycle over and over again, and will finally make honey after more than a hundred times of swallowing and spitting. They will also seal the honey with beeswax.

Bees make honey by taking honey as food, so the whole process of making honey is the process of storing food for the bee colony. The first thing bees do to make honey is to fly to flowers to absorb nectar, which is first stored in the honey sac of worker bees. The honey sac is a bulging part of the digestive tract, just in front of the stomach. There is a valve separating the honey sac from the stomach. When the nectar is still in the honey sac, the first stage of the honey making process begins, and the sugar content in the nectar changes. The next step is to remove most of the water in the nectar, which is done by filtration and evaporation in the digestive tract. Due to ventilation and the heat of the hive, the water in the nectar evaporates and decreases. The bees spit out nectar when they fly back to the hive. When the nectar is moved to the hive, most of the water has evaporated and disappeared. Therefore, honey can almost never go bad. Honey is stored in the hive to be ripened for future consumption.

The worker bees suck the nectar into their stomachs, fly back to the nest, and inject the nectar into the hive. Other worker bees keep flapping their wings to gradually dissipate the water in the nectar, while constantly moving the nectar outward from the middle honeycomb. When the nectar is fully mature, the worker bees seal the honeycomb with beeswax to prepare for wintering.

A bee can only produce one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. Every drop of honey is hard-earned for the little bee.

Honey making process:

1. Bees collect nectar by sucking nectar or other secretions from the root of the stamen into their special "honey stomach". The enzymes secreted by the bees can ferment the sucrose in the nectar in about half an hour and convert it into easily absorbed glucose and fructose.

2. After returning to the hive, the worker bees spit the fermented honey into the "storage room" and start the dehydration process. The temperature inside the hive is kept at around 35 degrees Celsius for a long time, and the worker bees in the hive will fan with their wings to cause the water in the nectar to evaporate, reducing the water content from 60% to 80% to less than 20%.

3. Seal the concentrated honey with beeswax and it can be stored for a long time. If there is not enough nectar nearby, the bees will collect some "nectar" and "honeydew" as processing raw materials to complete the honey making.

What does honey come from?

Honey

Honey is a natural food that everyone is familiar with. It is a translucent, viscous, sweet liquid that bees collect from the flowers of plants and bring back to the hive, where it is brewed, processed, and concentrated.

Bees work very hard to collect nectar. A bee can only carry 20 mg of nectar at a time. To collect 1 kg of nectar, worker bees have to fly 500,000 to 600,000 times. To produce 1 gram of honey, worker bees have to collect nectar from about 1,500 to 1,600 flowers. If bees collect nectar 1 km away from the hive, they have to fly 3 km to fill a honey sac. To produce 1 kg of honey, they need to fly 360,000 to 450,000 km, which is equivalent to 8.5 to 11 times around the earth. It can be seen that every drop of honey in the bottle is hard work.

Nectar is a sweet liquid containing 60-80% water. After the bees collect it, it takes 5-7 days for it to be evaporated and concentrated continuously to reduce the water content to below 20%. The sucrose in the nectar will be broken down by enzymes secreted by the body and converted into glucose and fructose to become honey. When the hive is full of honey, people use a honey shaker to shake it out, and it becomes sweet and delicious commercial honey after filtering and packaging.

It is a transparent or translucent viscous liquid at room temperature, with a specific gravity of 1.40-1.44 and colors ranging from water color to dark brown. It often varies with the type of nectar plant and each has its own unique aroma. Generally, light-colored honey has a light aroma, while dark-colored honey has a strong aroma. Honey has the characteristic of crystallization. At a temperature of 14-15 degrees Celsius, the glucose in honey is most likely to precipitate and crystallize, especially in honey with a higher glucose content. This is a normal phenomenon, and crystallization does not mean fake honey or inferior honey. Therefore, the presence or absence of crystallization cannot be used as an indicator of fake honey.

Reference: Bee magazine information

B

Honey is actually a sweet substance that is collected by bees from the nectar glands of plants or the secretions of the nectar glands outside flowers, mixed with bee enzymes, and fully brewed and stored in the honeycomb.

It's pollen

The first floor quoted is just popular science content~~Real natural science research shows that it is pollen~~

The real thing is that bees collect pollen and make nectar~~~

B. Nectar

pollen

Honey is made from nectar collected by bees from the nectaries of plants.