How do bees make honey?
Not surprisingly,
honeybees are experts at making honey and they have a well developed
plan for it that's been developed over literally thousands of years. It
all starts with a female worker bee who will spend her time collecting
nectar from the various flowers or plants that are blooming.
Its perhaps not
very well understood that, depending on where the honey is made, each
batch can be unique in taste or texture because it'll contain a unique
mixture of the different types of nectar that the honeybees have
collected. For example, if the only nectar source that's available to
the bees is red Tulips, then the honey the bees will produce will be
100% made from red Tulips. However, depending where the honeybees are,
there's a massive variety of different plants for the bees to collect
the nectar from. This is also true to say for the different times of
year too because, as one seasonal nectar flow dries up and another
starts, the bees change from one type of nectar to another and so the flavour of the honey will change too!
Once a honeybee
has been and collected some nectar she'll return home to the hive where
she'll pass the nectar to another younger worker bee before going back
out to collect more. As a typical foraging worker bee, she'll do this as many times per day as she can and will literally not stop until she's worn out the Thorax muscles used to flap her wings.
The younger worker bee will take the nectar from a returning forager into the hive and she'll start the process of turning the nectar into honey. To do this she'll first store the honey in a honeycomb cell and, once the cell is full, she'll start flapping her wings repeatedly at over 11,000 times per minute over the honeycomb to evaporate the liquid content until it reaches approximately 12%. This is particularly important because, if the liquid content is too high, the honey won't be the right consistency and texture and it'll likely run out of the honeycomb or, perhaps worse, evaporate and create a high moisture level in the hive.
Once the worker bee is happy that the moisture content of the nectar is sufficiently low, then she'll draw some wax to seal the honeycomb. Time to move onto the next honeycomb cell to repeat the process!
At Apis Gold, we've spent lots of time understanding the process that the bees use to create their honey and, because we appreciate how bigger task it is, we're grateful for every drop of honey our bees produce and, of course, we make sure there's plenty left in the hives too!
The good news is, we also want to share it with you!
