Bee Knowledgeable Answers: Honey!

Bees are best known for one thing: honey!
Honey is an incredible, energy-packed super food for bees. It is what energizes them to work constantly and tirelessly. How do you think bees make honey? Use your science textbook, your library, or the internet to find the answers.

1) What do honeybees gather to make into honey?

Forager bees collect nectar from flowers to make into honey. They use their tongue, called a proboscis, which acts like a straw to suck the nectar from the flower. Nectar is basically a kind of sweet, sugary water that plants make to entice bees to visit them (and pollinate them). Nectar is 80% water.

2)  Which part of a bee’s anatomy, or body, is used in the honey-making process?

Honeybees use their honey stomachs to turn the nectar into honey. Bees have two different stomachs, a honey stomach and a regular stomach. They store the nectar they gather in their honey stomach until it is full and they return to the hive. Inside the honey stomach are special ‘chemicals’ called enzymes. These enzymes eat the sugars in the nectar and turn them into simpler honey sugars. This is happening in the forager bee’s honey stomach while she is out visiting flowers. When she is full of nectar, she returns to the hive where other worker bees take it from her. These other bees, house bees, collect the nectar from the forager’s honey stomach using their proboscis.

3) What are the last steps in the process of making honey?

The house bees drink the nectar into their own honey stomachs. Here the enzymes inside the house bees honey stomachs finish converting or changing the sugars of the nectar. The house bees then regurgitate, or throw up, the honey into cells designated for honey storage. The fluid is left to evaporate a little. Evaporate means that the air takes some of the water content away. The bees will also fan their wings over the honey cells to help the evaporation. This turns the fluid into thick, sticky syrup. The finished honey is 14%-18% water. The bees then cap over the full honey cells with wax for storage. The bees can use this stored honey to get them through the winter when there are no flowers blooming for food sources.