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How Do Bees Make Honey? Maybe the Kids want to Know? How do Bees Make Honey for Kids?
So How do bees make honey?
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How do bees make honey? and How do bees make honey for kids to understand? This is a common question. Like every manufactured good, bees making honey require certain materials before they can start the honey making process.
The honey factory, or beehive, is also where bees live – a short commute to work, you would think! But bees also need to collect pollen from honey bee plants in order to make honey. These plants can be close to the hive or require the bees to fly great distances.
The first thing a honey bee does is collect nectar. Nectar comes from the center of certain flowers on the ground, like sunflowers, or flowers in trees, like apple trees. Many bee – friendly plants may already exist in your own honey bee garden gardens!
Honey bees are an industrious bunch. Their boss, the Queen Bee, gives birth to all the worker bees which are all female. Each female bee is sent to work when they are still very young.
But why do bees even make honey?
Honey bees collect enough nectar for making honey to make food for themselves so they can survive harsh winters. By collecting enough flower nectars for the bees to make honey, the honey bees also help preserve their colony and also help to keep us fit and healthy too.
But you’re still curious. You still want to know the answer to the question how exactly do bees turn nectar into making honey?
So what happens? How do Bees Make Honey?
One group of honey bees is sent off to collect flower nectars from plants. The group that goes out for nectar are called forager bees and they tend to be the older worker bees. The younger bees stay in the hive and help convert the nectar into honey.
The foraging honey bees not only collect nectar to help the hive, but they help the plants they use as well. By flying from flower to flower, bees help fertilize flowers and pollinate plants for the next growing season. In fact, many plants (like almond trees) depend on bees for reproduction. Maybe this is where the saying "circle of life" originated from!
To get at the nectar in the center of the plant, the honey bees use their long hairy tongues. These are called a proboscis. With their proboscis, the bees drink the nectar and store it in their special honey stomachs. The honey stomach only fits about an eye dropper of nectar. But don’t be fooled, filling up a bee’s stomach takes quite some time. A bee may have to drink from hundreds of flowers.
Once their honey stomachs are full, they continue the honey making process. Certain chemicals in their stomach start to break down the enzymes in the nectar.
The nectar they have collected is made up of about 80 percent water with some complex natural sugars. If these nectars are left alone in their most natural state, the nectar would inevitably undergo fermentation.
Instead of wasting the sugars, the honey bees store them in a usable form. To do this, they convert the natural sugar into honey by flapping their wings really fast to condense it.
Once the honey has been made, it contains only about 14 to 18 percent water. The pure flower nectars contain much more water than that. If you measured it pound for pound, you’d realize that honey provides a better, and not to mention greater, energy source than nectar.
When the older bees get back to the hive, the nectar they have collected is tested for honeybee approval. The actual process of transforming the pure nectar into honey begins with team work. This testing is done by the younger bees.
The younger honey bees are given the task of converting the collected nectar into making raw honey. If the nectar meets their approval, it is regurgitated into the top of a honey comb cell. This cell is made from beeswax, which keeps the honey safe and dry.
Once the bees have placed this mixture into the honeycomb cells, they fan the nectar by flapping their wings furiously onto the cell. Honey bees have four wings, which come in useful considering the amount of beating with their wings they have to do.
The fanning process helps to evaporate any remaining water. The evaporation allows the sugars to thicken and it then becomes raw honey. This honey also contains bits of pollen and Propolis, which they use to keep their hives clean and hygienic.
When they are happy with their honey produce they will seal it just as any finished product is packaged. Honeybees use beeswax as their packing materials.
This process of how bees make honey must exhaust the honey bees, as it can take anything from six to twenty four hours to complete this action.
The end product is the same raw honey we can buy in the supermarket or from a bee keeper. When we get our hands on it, we can all enjoy the benefits of eating honey without the hassle of actually making honey.
So overall, how do bees make honey? With a whole lot of effort!
Honey farmers are extremely careful with their honey bees and equipment for the purposes of selling delicious organic honey.
Interestingly, one single worker honey bee only produces about 1/12th of one teaspoon of honey in her entire lifetime. And it takes thousands of other worker honey bees to produce more than 200 pounds of honey. One bee making honey also has to fly the equivalent of almost twice around the world to make just 1lb. Just imagine, for us, honey is just a drive to the store away.
