How do bees get nectar back to the hive so they can start making honey?

Bee pollination is a crucial process where bees transfer pollen from one flower to another, enabling plants to reproduce and produce fruits, vegetables and seeds. Bees are attracted to flowers by their vibrant colors and enticing scents and they collect pollen and nectar for food.  As they move from flower to flower, their bodies, which are covered in tiny hairs, collect pollen grains. These grains are then transferred to the next flower, facilitating pollination. 

Pollination it’s A Dance of Life, Many plants rely on bees for pollination. Around 80% of all flowering plants depend on insect pollination and bees are vital to this process.  So, honey starts out as nectar, a rather dilute solution of various sugars that flowering plants produce to attract pollinating insects.

Most of these visitors drink it down on the spot as sustenance for themselves. A foraging worker bee, though, does things differently. After sucking it out of the flower with its straw-like proboscis, the bee deposits the nectar in its proventriculus or honey stomach. In a single flight, one bee can pollinate up to 100 flowers.

This can hold a lot of nectar often around 40 to 75 milligrams – up to almost half the bee’s unloaded body mass – and filling it may require a thousand flower visits depending on flower type, nectar abundance on each flower and secretion can be influenced by temperature and humidity. But based on scientific estimates, a single honey bee typically needs to visit anywhere from 100 to 1,500 flowers to fill its honey stomach with nectar.

The transformation of nectar into honey begins while the bee is still on the wing, as the proventriculus produces enzymes that break down the larger, complex sugar molecules into smaller ones.

Bee pollination doesn’t only benefit biodiversity and actually increases harvest yields as well as the quality of many crops.

What happens to the nectar when the bee returns to the hive?

On arrival back at the hive, the forager unloads its cargo by regurgitating the sugary solution to other workers, who pass it back and forth between each other, adding more enzymes each time and frothing it up with their mouthparts to encourage the evaporation of water.

What happens to the honey in the honeycomb?

Once it is sufficiently sticky and viscous, the concoction is laid down in the beeswax cells of the honeycomb and the workers continue the drying process by fanning it with their wings.

Only when the water content has been reduced to about 18 per cent (from about 75 per cent in the original nectar), do they seal the cells with beeswax lids. At this point, it is well and truly honey.

Why do bees make honey?

While pollen provides the colony with most of its protein and nutrient needs, honey is its primary source of sugar. Crucially, the stored honey serves as a stockpile to see it through the unproductive winter months.

Unlike Wasp and Bumblebee colonies, which die off at the end of the summer, honeybees overwinter within the hive.

Honey is an ideal long-term store of energy because it has an exceptionally long shelf-life. Pots from ancient Egyptian tombs have been found to contain honey that is supposedly perfectly edible. The high concentrations of sugar make for a hostile environment for yeasts and bacteria that might cause it to spoil. Its life span is extended further by one of the enzymes produced by the proventriculus, which generates hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid, both of which are toxic to microbes.

How much honey do bees make?

An average hive produces about 11kg of honey in a season, which requires the foragers to fly over 1.5 million kilometres between them. A standard jar of honey requires about 80,000km. To put it into even more perspective, to make just one gram of honey, a bee collective might have visited around 50,000 flowers! and for a typical 700g bottle of honey, that’s an incredible 35 million flower visits!

The sheer effort that has gone into making honey is worth remembering when spreading it onto toast – it can surely only add to the pleasure. So, the next time you see a bee flitting from flower to flower, you’ll have an even greater appreciation for the immense amount of work it’s doing to contribute to both its colony’s survival and our food supply!