The Making of Honey

Have you ever wondered how that sweet taste of honey gets into the jar, and then into your kitchen cabinet?

Bees, or the lack thereof, having been making recent headlines, which got my daughter and I into a long conversation on how honey is made. Without knowing the specifics, I set out to research it and found out quite a bit!

Honeybees use nectar to make honey. Nectar is almost 80% water with some complex sugars, in fact, if you've ever pulled a honeysuckle blossom off it's stem, nectar is the clear liquid that drops from the end. Bees get nectar from flowers like clovers, dandelions and fruit tree blossoms.

So far I'm ok with all of this....

Bees use their long, tube-like "tongue" to suck nectar out of the flowers and store it in their "honey stomachs." A honeybee actually has two stomachs, the other one being their "regular stomach." The "honey stomach" holds nectar, and when full, weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees visit between 100 and 1500 flowers to fill their honey stomachs.

I'm still ok here, but if you enjoy honey and can get nauseous easy, you might want to skip the next part!

From there the honeybee will return to the hive and pass the nectar on to other bees, commonly known as worker bees. The worker bees will literally suck the nectar from the honey stomach of the honeybee through their mouths. Yuck! The worker bees "chew" the nectar for about half an hour, during which the enzymes break down the sugars.

Something about regurgitated food tends to get to me, especially knowing that I'm eating it.

The bees will then spread nectar through the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it into syrup like consistency. The bees make the nectar dry faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is thick enough, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. Here, honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year's time, a colony of bees will eat between 120 and 200 pounds of honey!

While some of the facts in here are rather stomach turning to me, I still have to sit by and say I enjoy my honey. If I wasn't allergic to bees, I would almost be interested in having a hive and collecting the honey. I'll have to pass though, especially now knowing what I know. Some things I think are just better left unsaid!