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How Do Bees Make Honey?
- Posted by: Young Earth Sanctuary Resources Pte Ltd Admin
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- How do Bees make Honey
How Do Bees Make Honey?
Honey bees are extremely industrious and meticulous. The way they organise themselves is as efficient as our modern day corporate entities. Inside the beehive each bee has a special job to do and the whole process runs smoothly.
You may not know this, but bees need two different kinds of food. The first kind is the honey that is from the flower nectar (the savoury juice that is in the heart of the flowers). And the second kind comes from the anthers of flowers. The anthers contain numerous small grains called pollen. Pollens are colourful small grains that differ in colours from flower to flower
How Do Honey Bees Get Their Energy?
Most bees gather only pollen or nectar. As the bee sucks the nectar from the flower, it stores it in her special honey stomach. It then readily transfers the nectar to the honey-making bees in the hive. She would open a valve in the nectar “sac” and a portion of the payload passes through to her own stomach. Shen then converts them to energy for her own needs.
The bee is a marvelous flying machine as she could carry a payload of nectar or pollen close to her own weight. In the human world, even the most advanced design in aircraft can only take off with a load of 25% of its own weight. One should appreciate the miracle of nature that the honeybee can remain airborne with such a load.
How Honey is Processed in the Hives
When her nectar “sacs” are full, the honeybee returns to the hive. The honeybee would deliver the nectar one of the bees in the hive. The nectar passes from mouth-to-mouth, from one bee to another until its moisture content is reduced from about 70% to 18%. This changes the nectar into honey. Occasionally the incomingn bee stores th nectar immediately into cells of the honeycomb before the mouth-to-mouth process. This is because some evaporation is happens due to the 32.5°C temperature inside the hive.
Storage
Finally, the honey-making bee places the honey in storage cells and capped with beeswax, in readiness for the arrival of newborn baby bees. The bees mixes the pollen with nectar to make “bee bread” and to feed its larvae. A baby bee needs food rich in protein so that the bee community could flourish.
Throughout her life cycle, the bee will work tirelessly collecting pollen, bringing it back to the hive, cleaning herself, then setting out for more pollen. (Yes, before returning to the flower again for more pollen, the bee combs, cleans and cares for herself so that she could work more efficiently.)
Forager bees start out from the hive for blossom patches when three weeks old.
There will be many other bees working at the same time, and the air will be noisy with their droning. It takes 300 bees about three weeks to gather 450 g of honey. On average, a hive contains 40,000 bees.
This is how honey is being made.
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