Topics Animals, plants and life

How do bees make honey?

Bees make honey from flower nectar, a thin, sugary liquid. A forager sips nectar from a flower, stores it in a special stomach called the honey stomach, and flies back to the hive. There, other worker bees take it over, mix it with enzymes from their bodies, and spread it into wax cells. Then they fan it with their wings until most of the water evaporates. What is left is thick enough to keep for months, and the bees seal it under a wax cap.

What makes this interesting is that no single bee does the whole job. Honey is made by a relay: foragers, house bees, and fanners each handle a piece, and the nectar changes hands several times along the way. The enzymes break the sugars down into simpler ones, and the drying turns a watery liquid into something close to a syrup that bacteria and mold struggle to live in. Why the bees do all this is simple: it is their winter food.

An episode on this topic would follow one drop of nectar from flower to sealed cell, and ask the questions you might ask, like whether bees vomit it up (not quite) and how much a bee makes in a lifetime. bre is made by AI hosts, so they can get details wrong, and you can press Talk to ask a question mid-episode.

What a bre episode would cover

An outline of the episode bre would make for this question. Every episode is written fresh when you ask, so yours will differ.

  1. The forager and the honey stomachA worker bee sips nectar and stores it in a second stomach separate from her digestive one. We look at how she carries it home and why it is not the same as eating.
  2. Handing it off in the hiveBack at the hive, the nectar passes mouth to mouth between workers. Each handoff adds enzymes and starts the chemical change.
  3. What the enzymes actually doEnzymes split the complex sugar in nectar into simpler sugars. This is a big part of why honey is different from sweet flower water.
  4. Fanning off the waterBees spread the nectar in wax cells and beat their wings to drive off moisture. Honey needs to be thick and low in water to keep.
  5. Capping the cellOnce the honey is ready, the bees seal the cell with a thin wax lid. We talk about why this keeps it good for a long time.
  6. Why bees bother, and what we takeHoney is the colony's food for cold months and lean times. We cover how beekeepers harvest it and what is left for the bees.

How the episode might open

A sample exchange between two of bre’s AI hosts, bre and Cal. Both are AI; this is written by AI, as every bre episode is.

  1. breAI host

    Okay, so here's the question I think most people have but never say out loud. Is honey just bee vomit? Because I've heard that, and I want to know if it's fair.

  2. CalAI host

    Ha. I've heard it too. Short answer: not really. But the long answer is stranger, and I think I like it better.

  3. breAI host

    Then start with the bee. She lands on a flower. What does she do with the nectar?

  4. CalAI host

    She sucks it up through a tongue-like tube and stores it in a separate pouch called the honey stomach. It's not the stomach she digests food in. It's more like a carrying tank, and she can fill it up over many flowers before she heads home.

  5. breAI host

    So it's a shopping bag, not a meal.

  6. CalAI host

    Pretty much. Hold on, how does that actually work, though? Because nectar is mostly water, and honey is not. Something has to happen between the flower and the jar.

  7. breAI host

    That's the part I want to get to. Enzymes, and a lot of wing fanning. But I don't want to rush it.

  8. CalAI host

    Good, because the handoff in the hive is where it gets weird. The nectar goes from bee to bee, mouth to mouth, a few times before it ever lands in a cell.

Questions people also ask

Is honey bee vomit?
Not exactly. Bees carry nectar in a honey stomach, which is separate from the stomach that digests food. At the hive they pass it to other bees, who bring it back up and mix in enzymes. It is regurgitated in a technical sense, but it is not vomit from digestion.
How long does it take bees to make honey?
It varies with the weather, the flowers in bloom, and the size of the colony. The nectar is processed over days as the bees pass it around and fan it dry. Honey is only capped once it is thick enough, so there is no single fixed time.
Why do bees fan their wings over the honey?
Fanning moves air through the hive and helps water evaporate from the nectar. Fresh nectar is quite watery, and honey has to be much thicker to keep. Bees also fan for other reasons, like cooling the hive, so not all fanning is about honey.
Do bees make honey for people?
No. Bees make honey as food for the colony, especially for winter and times when few flowers are in bloom. Beekeepers harvest the extra, and a responsible one leaves enough for the bees to live on. How much to leave depends on the hive and climate.

Related topics

More: all 300 topics, animals, plants and life, or the longer reads on /learn.

bre’s hosts are AI, and every episode is generated, so they can be wrong: check anything that matters. This page outlines what an episode would cover. It is for interest and learning, not medical, financial or legal advice.