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Curious Kids: How do bees make honey?
Posted by The Conversation |
Wednesday 9 September 2020, 12:42 PM (EST)
In this Curious Kids series, children have their questions answered by experts. Finn, age 7, from the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, wants to know how bees make honey. An expert in bees explains.
When we talk about "bees", we're usually referring to the European honey bee (its scientific name is Apis mellifera). Humans have been drooling over its honey and taking advantage of its pollination powers for thousands of years.
So how do these insects make honey, you ask? You'll find the task is one requiring teamwork and organisation.
Busy buzzing bees
You probably already know about the most important ingredient needed to make honey: flowers.
A colony of bees can visit up to 50 million flowers each day, with as many as 60,000 bees in each colony. They're not called busy bees for nothing!
Honey bees work together as a team to make decisions about where the best flowers are. They communicate with each other using bumps, noises and even dance moves known as the waggle dance.
All bees during their life have different roles, depending on how old they are. To make honey, worker honey bees fly up to 5 kilometres searching for flowers and their sweet nectar. Usually, they'll visit between 50 and 100 flowers per trip.
Nectar is the main ingredient for honey and also the main source of energy for bees. Using a long straw-like tongue called a proboscis, honey bees suck up nectar droplets from the flower's special nectar-making organ, called the nectary.
When the nectar reaches the bee's honey stomach, the stomach begins to break down the complex sugars of the nectar into more simple sugars that are less prone to crystallization, or becoming solid. This process is called "inversion".
Once a worker honey bee returns to the colony, it passes the nectar on to another younger bee called a house bee (between 12 and 17 days old).
House bees take the nectar inside the colony and pack it away in hexagon-shaped beeswax honey cells. They then turn the nectar into honey by drying it out using a warm breeze made with their wings.