How do honeybees make honey?
A colony of bees can visit up to 50 million flowers each day, with as many as 60,000 bees in each colony.
All bees have different roles. To make honey, worker honey bees fly up to 5km searching for flowers and their nectar. Usually, they’ll visit between 50 and 100 flowers per trip. Nectar is the main ingredient for honey and also the main source of energy for bees.
Using a long straw-like tongue called a proboscis, honey bees suck up nectar droplets from the flower. When the nectar reaches the bee’s honey stomach, the stomach begins to break down the complex sugars of the nectar into more simple sugars.
Once a worker honey bee returns to the colony, it passes the nectar onto another younger bee called a house bee. House bees take the nectar inside the colony and pack it away in hexagon-shaped beeswax honey cells. They then turn the nectar into honey by drying it out using a warm breeze made with their wings.
Once the honey has dried out, they cover the honey cell using fresh beeswax. In the winter, when there is not as much nectar available, the bees open this lid and share the honey they saved.
Also, bees don’t just collect nectar to make honey. When they visit flowers, they also collect pollen – which is a great source of protein to keep them healthy and strong.Pollen are produced by flowering plants.
Pollen can spread in ways such as being blown around by the air, or being carried between two of the same plant by an insect. So by transferring pollen between flowers, bees also help pollinate flowers. These often turn into the seeds of the fruits. In fact, about one-third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees.
Do you know
The yellow fuzzy honey bee is just one of over 20,000 bee species in the world.
Some native stingless bees are found only in Australia — Tetragonula carbonaria and Austroplebeia australis.
Giant honey bee (Apis dorsata) in Nepal and Indonesia live at the top of high cliffs and large trees.
