Bees and how they make honey

Bees collect honey, we steal it from them, and we eat it. We do some flavoring and other stuff on our side, but how to actually make the honey is on the bee’s end. So, today, let’s take a look into how the bees collect pollen and nectar

The first step is to find flowers. That’s not hard – they’re all over the place. Some bees can collect from over 10,000 flowers every day. As they sip up the nectar with their long tongues, their legs also collect large cases of pollen.

As the bee takes more stops, the pollen on their legs brush off and fertilizes with other flowers to make seeds. The bee also keeps collecting nectar, storing it in its special nectar stomach. The bee’s stomach has a special chemical that breaks down sugar in the nectar. If the bee gets hungry, it will eat and use up some of its collected nectar.

After the special stomach is filled up, the bee will fly back to the hive to make the nectar into honey. The bees dry it using a variety of ways, such as fanning it with their wings, sucking out the water, and drying it out on their tongues after sucking out water. After very little water remains, the bees will store the food in small, hexagon wax containers for later.

Now, let’s get into the daily life of bees.

A Queen bee’s life is basically spent mating and laying eggs. However, if more than one junior queen be hatches out, the two competitors will fight until one of them dies or flies away to form a new hive. (This mostly happens between siblings – not mother and daughter.)

A drone bee’s job is to mate with the Queen and just wait. They wait and wait until they have an opportunity to mate. Most drones (out of hundreds) don’t wait up till the day they get to mate, and just die.

Worker bees are by far the most busy. They work themselves to death in a few weeks. These are jobs they are responsible for:

1. Nursing the grubs
2. cleaning the hive
3. guarding the hive
4. making honey and nectar
5. feeding the queen
6. feeding the drones
7. feeding the grubs
8. making body wax (the wax oozes out of their bodies)
9. building new honey cells (out of wax)

Thanks for reading! -Written by EZ