What’s the Deal With Honey?

I grew up in New York City — in, it seems to me now, a TV room. This was attached by sidewalk to various bits of public transit, grocery stores both big (Pathmark) and small (we called them bodegas), and restaurants.

Honey, to me, was an ingredient indistinguishable from all the world’s many ingredients: There was honey and lemon in your tea when you had a sore throat, honey in the baklava at the Greek diner, and . . . and I’m struggling to name a third use of honey in my childhood. It was in no way more extraordinary in my mind than wasabi, saffron, cardamom, or any of the dozens of things one ate now and then, though not too often.

I was a fourth-generation New Yorker, able to navigate a dozen paths crosstown in the event of a water-main break, but ignorant of all I was ignorant of, as all people are.

Then I moved to Minnesota for college, where I learned what was in the great outdoors. Trees. Birds. Farms. I learned to appreciate the better meats and cheeses.

Yet my real eureka moment came when I was invited to see a lovingly restored prairie, not too far from the shores of the Mississippi River.

Giant bees the size of my thumb buzzed by, with a low-throbbing music like a motorboat. Little metallic-green bees flashed like glitter in the air. Honeybees busily worked the flowers while dragonflies patrolled the skies. Every square foot was a carnival of inexpressible zinging, flying movement.

My host said some important things about soil health, but I only caught a portion of it because my jaw was on the ground: This was life? This was nature? It was as if I had lived my whole life in black and white and suddenly could see the world in color.

I had never even begun to imagine such a diversity of bees, such an explosion of life. How many bees are there, anyway?

The answer: fewer than there have ever been in modern America.

“There used to be 5 million hives in America after World War II,” says Brian Fredericksen, a resolutely local beekeeper and owner of Ames Farm Honey, near Minneapolis. “Now we’re down to half of that.”

With the decline of local bees comes the decline in quality of the average supermarket honey. I suspect that a good part of the reason for this is that more Americans are growing up like I did: in a world of innumerable screens, where we leave those screens to visit various retail destinations where saffron and wasabi and honey are just interesting words that differentiate protein bowls.

Yet here’s what honey really is: a little-appreciated miracle.

How Honey Is Made

Many wild species of bees make honey to feed their young as well as themselves in times of famine. Yet only the honeybee, Apis mellifera, lives in big enough groups to make honey in quantities that humans find useful.

Before the advent of beekeeping, honeybees built their hives in the hollows of trees. Modern beekeeping involves creating spaces where honeybees can live and make honey outside of trees.

When bees made too much honey in the wild, the surplus would inspire a swarm. A good portion of the colony would then buzz off to start a new one. In a beekeeper’s hive, surplus honey is removed and sold, and the bees stay and keep working.

From a bee’s perspective, honey is made and used as follows: Plants that want to make more plants require pollination. This involves an exchange of pollen within their own species, which is achieved by the action of wind (how corn and lawn grass do it), or by pollinators that carry plant pollen around directly.

To lure these pollinators, plants offer nectar. Some (such as roses) publicize their stock by setting up a big, showy billboard; others (like willow) simply produce so much that pollinators can smell it. Honeybees, and all pollinators, come to get this nectar, which is their food.

In the case of honeybees, they use their proboscis to suck nectar into a discrete pouch. “That’s their chemistry lab,” Fredericksen explains. “They add enzymes and other things.”

Scientists have identified 180 compounds in the final product we call honey, ranging from antioxidants to the obvious sugars.

You’ll sometimes hear people describe honey as bee vomit — but this is far from the truth. Bee anatomy is different from human anatomy: They have stomachs and nectar pouches, and these are separate. Older bees fill their nectar pouches with nectar from the flowers and then bring it back to the hive, where they either eat the nectar or feed it to other bees.

Typically, the bees in the hive will pass the nectar from mouth to mouth (which is really pouch to pouch), where their digestive enzymes break down the sugars and prevent crystallization. This process also helps to dry it out to 18 percent moisture content or less, so that it can be stored as honey.

In addition to nectar, bees also forage a resinous material from tree sap that they form into an antiviral, antibacterial, antifungal protective material called propolis, with which they line their hives. (Dissolved in an alcohol tincture, propolis is used by humans to treat minor burns and cleanse wounds.) Honeybees also collect some pollen, which they eat at various periods during their life cycles.