We have known the extremely useful and healthy uses of natural honey, the uses in healing and beauty for women. Especially as ingredients and spices to make your dishes more sweet, attractive and nutritious. Have you ever wondered how honey is made?
To answer this question you need to understand: bees do not make honey . The honey we know is the nectar of flowers after it has been synthesized, sucked and filtered by bees.
Honey is a solution made by bees from the nectar of flowers, like solid sugar, with a sweet taste. The structure of honey includes fructose and glucose, water, oil and a special enzyme.
Honey is a solution made by bees from the nectar of flowers.
A colony or hive consists of one queen, hundreds of male honey bees, and thousands of worker bees – sterile female bees whose job is to collect nectar from flowers, make wax, build nests, and make honey to feed other bees.
Honey bees use nectar to make honey. Nectar contains almost 80% water and some complex sugars. The first step in the honey making process begins when bees fly from flower to flower to “collect” nectar. They use their proboscis to suck nectar from flowers and store it in their special stomach pouch. Bees have two stomachs – a stomach used to build nectar called honey stomach and a normal stomach used to digest food. The honey stomach can hold up to nearly 70mg of nectar and when full, it will weigh almost the weight of a bee.
Bees need between 100 and 1500 flowers to fill their stomachs. They will then return to the hive and will transfer that stored nectar to other worker bees at home. These worker bees will suck nectar from the aforementioned honey bees into their mouths, then “chew” the nectar for about half an hour, during which time enzymes in the mouth will convert flowers to complex sugars complex in nectar into simple sugars so it will be both easier to digest and reduce the ability of bacteria to enter during storage. The bees will then distribute the nectar into compartments inside the hive where the water in the nectar will be condensed and the nectar will turn into a more concentrated syrup. Bees use their wings to dry the nectar. As soon as the honey is thick enough, the bees close the compartments with a beeswax stopper. Honey is stored and eaten gradually. In a year, a bee will produce about 55-91 kg of honey.
It takes 88,000km to fly and 2 million flowers to make 500g of honey. A normal beehive can produce 27-45kg a year.
Honey comes in many colors.
Bees are small, but their lives are also very complicated and have many interesting things. This creature not only produces honey for life, but is also very useful for agriculture and for our food supply. When bees search for nectar they often transfer pollen (which sticks to their feet) from male plants to female plants and this phenomenon is called pollination in biology.