How do bees make honey?

 So how do bees make honey, this delicious and beneficial food? Derived mainly from nectar, this product results from a transformation carefully orchestrated by the little workers and they jealously guard it to support their hive. Very varied according to its origin, there is not a single honey, and it is the flowering plants that are the source of this treasure!

The stages of honey making

Honey is a sweet substance that bees make from the nectar of flowers, honeydew of insects, or sweet secretions of plants. They forage for this nectar and then transform it.

A hive is a very well-organized world, managed by several categories of bees. There are the cleaners, the nannies, the foragers, the babysitters... In reality, each bee will successively occupy various positions.

1. It is the foragers who go to harvest the nectar. They plunge their tongue into the heart of the flower to suck this liquid, and they store it in their crop (waiting bag located at the beginning of the digestive tract), where it will begin to transform.
2. Once back at the hive, they transmit this nectar to recipients by trophallaxis (the action of regurgitating food stored in the crop to exchange it with another bee).
3. The nectar will pass through many workers, each circulating it between their "mouth" and their crop. It is thus mixed with saliva, an enzyme (invertase) that will gradually modify the original sucrose into more digestible sugars such as glucose and fructose. Sucrose is not the only element modified during this process, indeed nectar is composed of many elements. A small part of the glucose obtained will also be modified thanks to another enzyme (glucose oxidase) which will provide honey with an acid, gluconic acid, whose low pH will prevent the development of bacteria and fungi. This second enzyme also produces hydrogen peroxide which is responsible for protecting honey throughout its maturation.
4. It is then deposited in cells.
5. In this warm place, the moisture that the nectar (already transformed) contains will evaporate for the part. In addition, it is constantly ventilated by ventilating workers. In the end, only about 20% (ideally less than 18%) of moisture remains in the honey.
6. When the honey is dry enough to stabilize, the bees close the cells with waterproof seals. Protected from air and moisture, it will continue to mature slowly but will not risk any alteration.

Did you know? The invertase introduced into the nectar by bees continues its long-term action, this enzyme is indeed always present in the honey we consume!

Flowers and nectar

At the beginning of honey, there is a flowering plant. It has developed a fine strategy to reproduce: it secretes nectar to attract insects which, by collecting this precious liquid, will collect pollen grains from their bodies. And by foraging from flower to flower, pollen will be deposited on their pistil, thus allowing fertilization and therefore the reproduction of many plants. Bees are not the only pollinating insects (bumblebees, butterflies, hoverflies, and other flies, and beetles ...) but they are the main actors in this role. They are indeed terribly effective, being able to forage up to 250 flowers in 1 hour. Very hairy, their legs can each carry 500,000 pollen grains! 

Did you know? Bees have a very effective method to avoid a flower that has already been foraged: during their nectar harvest, they deposit pheromones on the flower; A strong presence of pheromones will warn the following that the ray has been robbed! Little by little, the pheromones will fade, and other bees will return to forage there.

Why are there different kinds of honey?

The composition of nectar can be very different depending on the flowers, climate, temperature, and other environmental criteria: the number of sugars present, vitamins, and aromas ...

The color of the foraged flowers also plays on the nectar by leaving pigments. The resulting honey will also display a particular hue: ivory for lavender or linden kinds of honey, golden for sunflower honey, and dark for chestnut or heather honey.

In addition, bees collect not only nectar, but they also collect honeydew from small insects (aphids, mealybugs). Honeydew consists of the residues of the sap extracted by these insects. They absorb only the elements they need and reject sugars and water. Moreover, honeydew is very rich in sugars, and these are not the same as the sugars contained in nectars. It is thanks to honeydew that there is for honey!

How do bees use honey?

Honey certainly makes up part of the larvae's food (mixed with pollen in a very rich porridge), but bees also feed on it when it is cold or raining (they do not go out at these times). Bees have a particular way of life. Unlike other Hymenoptera, they remain active even in winter and must therefore build up food stocks. In fact, there are summer bees, whose life is quite short, and winter bees, which are born at the end of the season and will live until spring, without leaving the hive once! Their role is only to keep the queen alive. They form a tight cluster around it and the closest ones vibrate their muscles to keep the hive warm. It can be 30 ° in the heart of the bunch! They take turns so that it does not always drown the same people who provide this intense effort. 

Did you know? In wasps, for example, only the queen survives after autumn. Ants enter diapause when it is cold. Other bee species are not social insects and also hibernate.

A brief reminder of the life of bees

Bees belong to the order Hymenoptera. Our honeybees (Apis mellifera) are the most familiar to us, but there are more than 20,000 species of honeybees in the world.

Like all insects, they all have a body composed of three distinct segments: the head, thorax, and abdomen. They have six legs, two antennae, and two compound eyes. In addition, fine hairs called "bristles" cover their bodies.

Bees probably fascinate first because they live (for the most part, but this is not the case with solitary bees) in very well-organized colonies. Each colony consists of a queen, surrounded by thousands of workers and a few males. The queen is the only fertile bee and is responsible for laying eggs. The workers are sterile and perform all the other tasks related to the life of the colony: collecting nectar and pollen, building and maintaining the hive, feeding the larvae, and defending the colony. Males are used only for breeding.