Honey is the only ready-to-eat food product made by insects. In addition, this is one of the most useful products for humans, a real storehouse of health. Honey contains vitamins, minerals, important amino acids. It helps strengthen immunity and cure various diseases.
Now we are talking about bee honey, but it is known that bumblebees also make this product. Bumblebee honey is also very useful for humans, however, its price is much higher, and it is difficult to get it. After all, the life cycle of a bumblebee family is short - from spring to autumn, and they do not need supplies for the winter.
Surely each of us thought about how exactly bees make honey. Let's try to figure this out.
Why do bees make honey?
People enjoy honey with pleasure, and in the wild - bears and other animals. But honey is made by bees not at all in order to please us. The bee family needs honey for its own food and raising offspring. In addition, the bee’s body is designed in such a way that it can hardly remain hungry. Her goiter should be filled with honey, otherwise she will live no more than 15 minutes.
During the collection of nectar, a part of it is used by a bee to maintain its own strength. But most of the honey is harvested by these insects for the winter. For a year, a bee colony eats 60-100 kg of honey, while consuming only half of the manufactured product.
Hive population
In order to tell how bees make honey, we will first explain some important points.
As everyone knows, bees, just like ants and bumblebees, are social insects. All members of the bee family are busy with their work.
The bees collecting nectar are field bees. Their task is to deliver a nutritious sweet liquid to the hive, where the uterus, as well as females, drones, larvae and other bees, feed it.
There are still bee scouts. They fly around the neighborhood and, returning to the hive, using special movements (sometimes talking about bee dancing) tell the rest of the bees where it is worth flying, where suitable flowers grow.
There are working bees in the hive. They are busy feeding larvae, building honeycombs, making honey, guarding and cleaning the hive. Working bees are young individuals who have not reached 12-15 days of age. Two weeks after turning from a larva into full-fledged bees, they fly out to "field" work.
The uterus lays eggs from which larvae develop. Uterus, future workers and field bees emerge from female larvae. Male larvae turn into drones.
What do bees make honey from?
Honey bees are made from nectar. Nectar is a thick, sugary liquid that accumulates in the lower part of the flower bed. How exactly does a bee make honey from nectar? Using a special tubule language. Insects get nectar from various flowers: clover, dandelion, alfalfa, sunflower, mustard, buckwheat, gourds and vegetables, as well as flowering trees and shrubs.
I must say that a bee has two stomachs. One enters food for its own saturation, and the second one needs the insect to carry nectar. A stomach filled with nectar weighs 50-70 mg, which is approximately equal to the weight of the bee.
In addition, there are special baskets on the hind legs of the bee, and brushes on the front legs. They are designed to collect and transfer flower pollen to the hive, which the bees pre-wet with nectar. This treated pollen is called pollen.
And so, the field bee filled the stomach with nectar, and then what? Then carries nectar to the hive, and then back to work, to the flowers. By the way, at least 1000 flowers visit an insect at a time! This is probably why the people have such a respectful attitude to bees. They even say about working people: "He is hardworking, like a bee."
So, the field bee flew into the hive. Worker bees sucked nectar from her stomach. Next, part of the nectar goes to feed the larvae, and honey is prepared from the other part.
How do bees make honey?
They do it like that. Working bees pass nectar through their goiters for quite some time, saturating the raw materials with their saliva. This process is somewhat reminiscent of chewing. Bee saliva enzymes break down complex sugars in nectar. On the one hand, this helps nectar to be easier to digest, on the other hand, the product processed in this way is less prone to spoilage and more suitable for storage.
Chewed nectar is laid out by working bees on the honeycombs. Moreover, it doesn’t just fold out, small drops of nectar “hang out” on the cell walls. But this is not honey. It will turn into honey when the water from nectar (and nectar consists of 80% water) evaporates, and the honey ripens, reaching the desired consistency.
To evaporate water from the future honey and to prevent it from fermenting, you need to constantly “air” the hive. To solve this problem, the bees vigorously wave their wings over their combs. The hive is filled with buzzing. If there are a lot of flowers around and the bees, as beekeepers say, have a “big bribe”, this buzzing continues at night. Bees of one hive can collect up to 4.5 kg of nectar per day.
In addition, the beehive is constantly cleaned by bees: all the garbage accidentally caught in it is immediately thrown away.
As moisture evaporates and the bees ripen, honey transfers honey to the upper rows of honeycombs. When the cell is full, it will be hermetically sealed with wax. This wax is produced by special bee glands.
How do bees build honeycombs?
Wax is produced in special glands located on the lower part of the abdomen. Beeswax is tiny, fat-like thin scales processed by the upper jaws (mandibles). The insect rolls them into lumps and, as necessary, layer by layer, builds honeycombs from them.
Honeycombs are plates made up of cells. The thickness of the plate is usually not more than 2.5 cm. The total height of the honeycombs and other dimensions depend on the size of the hive or hollow.
Plates with honeycombs are attached vertically to the ceiling of the hive. The centimeter distance between them, which the beekeepers call a "street", allows the bees to work each in their place, without touching the backs of each other.
Bee honeycombs are composed of cells. The shape of most cells is a strict hexagon. Interestingly, according to scientific research, it is this form that gives the maximum capacity of the contents with the minimum cost of building material.
The size of the cells depends on their purpose. The largest oval cells of the honeycomb are intended for drones and queens. In ordinary, bees are hatched, in honey (they are deeper than ordinary and are located on the edges of the plates), honey stocks are stored.
Above we talked about how bees make honey and honeycombs.
The main products of the vital activity of the bee
In addition to honey, man has found application for many other bee products. All of them are unique in their own way and have a whole range of useful healing properties. Among them are bee venom, propolis (or bee glue), flower pollen and pollen, wax, royal jelly.
Let us briefly dwell on some of them.
Propolis is collected by bees in the form of resin from various plants. In the process of drawing a resinous thread, for example, from a wood crack, a bee adds secrets of its own glands to it.
The beginning of the procurement of propolis by the bee family is considered to be the middle or end of summer, when the air begins to cool in anticipation of autumn and the bees close the cracks in the hive with propolis to preserve heat.
In pollen collected and processed by bees, lactic acid is formed to protect it from spoilage. The final product obtained from pollen is called bee bread. The perga is tamped, tightly packed into the cells, and poured with honey on top for preservation. With a mixture of honey and bees, bees feed larvae.
Royal jelly is called so because it looks like real milk cream both in consistency and in color - from white to white-cream. This product, although mixed with bees with honey and bee bread, tastes something completely different and has nothing to do with the usual honey sweetness.
Royal jelly is made by bees of various saturations with nutrients and hormones - for feeding ordinary newborn larvae or queen bees. The larvae of future queens live in queen cells - oval-shaped large cells filled with this product.
I must say that in the open air the royal jelly obtained by beekeepers quickly deteriorates, soured and losing its beneficial properties. Procurement of this product requires skills and special equipment.
You can talk for a long time about how and why bees make honey. But to what has already been said, it is worth adding only that no laboratory in the world was able to make honey similar to natural and invent a technology that replaces a bee when collecting nectar.
In this article, we talked about how bees make honey, as well as some other beekeeping products.