How do bees make honey

One of the ways that bees work to ensure the success of the hive is through honey production and storage. We think the process of making honey is amazing! Bees are smart and practical. During the spring and summer, worker bees are busy collecting nectar and pollen so they can make stores of honey for the winter. Bees would not survive outside of the hive in the cold winter months.

Sources of food are also very scarce during the winter. New honey bees eat the nectar and pollen, so they are strong and ready to work once the springtime hits. The production of honey is a multi-step process, as you can imagine. When the worker bee has found a good source of nectar, she gets to work!

Using her proboscis , she sucks up nectar from the inside of flowers, often visiting more than flowers on one foraging trip. The nectar, along with a little bit of honey bee saliva, is stored in a special sac called a honey stomach. Once the honey stomach is full, the worker bee will return to the hive to drop off the load.

Back at the hive, bees known as house bees wait for the foragers to return. Throughout her life cycle, the bee will work tirelessly collecting pollen, bringing it back to the hive, cleaning herself, then setting out for more pollen. Forager bees start out from the hive for blossom patches when three weeks old. As they live to be only six or seven weeks old they have much work to do and little time in which to do it.

There will be many other bees working at the same time, and the air will be noisy with their droning. It takes bees about three weeks to gather g of honey. On average, a hive contains 40, bees.

The bees mix this with a special substance called the ' bee enzyme '. A basic scientific formula is as follows:. There are different presentations set, comb honey and so on and there are also subtle differences between honeys from different bee hives, depending on where the bees have been foraging. For further information, take a look at my page: Types Of Honey. The honey you are familiar with, is made only by honey bees. Bumble bees don't make honey, instead, they have little pots of nectar.

You can read more about this 'do bumble bees make honey' here. For bumble bees, it's more a case of storing nectar for a short time period, because bumble bee colonies do not last as long as honey bee colonies do. Honey bee colonies have to feed a colony of workers plus the queen through the winter.

With bumble bees, only the queen survives, and the rest of the colony will die. However, there is another type of bee, referred to as the Melipona , which is a genus of stingless bees , and which makes a type of honey in small quantities, but this type of honey is not widely available. It's always worth remembering Whenever honey bees visit flowers to gather nectar with which to make honey, they pollinate flowers. Some native stingless bees only found in Australia , such as Tetragonula carbonaria and Austroplebeia australis , produce honey too.

There are also ten other honey bee species overseas, such as the giant honey bee Apis dorsata in Nepal and Indonesia, which live at the top of high cliffs and large trees.

Portsmouth Climate Festival — Portsmouth, Portsmouth. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Worker bees with capped brood brown , open brood white larva , all sorts of coloured pollen and shiny fresh nectar.

Cooper Schouten , Author provided. Cooper Schouten , Southern Cross University.