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Chapter 2
Looking at How Honey Is Made and Harvested
IN THIS CHAPTER
Honey bees are the only insects that produce a food that consumers eat. And we eat a lot of it. Here in the United States, the annual per capita consumption is around 1.7 pounds per person (eaten on its own, in cooking and baking, and as a sweetening ingredient in other food products).
Considering the U.S. population is around 328 million people, that’s a whole lot of honey. But the bees don’t do all that work just to feed us. It’s their own sustenance.
In this chapter, you discover why and how bees make honey, the good stuff that honey contains, and how it’s harvested. Plus, you find some interesting betcha-didn’t-know info about the bees themselves.
Gathering Their Groceries
There are two raw ingredients that bees collect to convert into the foods they eat for nourishment: pollen and nectar.
The actual pollen-based food bees eat is called beebread. It’s processed from the pollen that the field bees collect from flowering plants. This is the bees’ source of protein. According to the USDA, pollen has between 2.5 percent to 61 percent protein content (depending upon its source). Visiting a flower, the foraging bee uses the pollen baskets on her rear legs to store and transport the pollen home (see Figure 2-1). Although pollen is not used by the bees to make honey, grains of pollen are found in all honeys and become part of the nutritional goodness of honey.
Photo by Stephen Ausmus, USDA Agricultural Research Service
FIGURE 2-1: Photo of a worker field bee collecting pollen. Note the pollen baskets on her rear legs packed with pollen for the return trip to the hive.
The field bees also forage flowering plants to collect nectar. This is what the bees use to make honey. Once they have chosen an attractive, sweet-smelling flower, they suck up nectar with their long, straw-like tongue (see Figure 2-2). Bees visit many flowers (about 40 per minute), eventually carrying the collected nectar back to their colony in a distension of the esophagus called a honey sac (also sometimes called the honey stomach). They can carry more than their own weight in nectar. Once back in the hive, the house worker bees take over (see the “Busy as a bee” sidebar).
USGS Native Bee Lab
FIGURE 2-2: Note the long tongue on this honey bee. It unrolls like a noisemaker on New Year’s Eve.
“BUSY AS A BEE”
There’s a reason the saying “busy as a bee” exists. In their relatively short life during the summer (six weeks), the all-female worker bees pack in a lot of job responsibilities. Worker honey bees spend the first few weeks of their lives carrying out very specific tasks within the hive. For this reason, they are referred to as house bees. The jobs they do are dependent on their age:
Housekeeping (Days 1 to 3): A worker bee is born with the munchies. Immediately after she emerges from the cell and grooms herself, she engorges herself with bee bread (pollen) and honey. Following this binge, one of her first tasks is cleaning out the cell from which she just emerged. This cell and other empty cells are cleaned and polished and left immaculate to receive new eggs or to store nectar and pollen.
Undertaking (Days 3 to 16): The honey beehive is one of the cleanest and most sterile environments found in nature. Preventing disease is an important early task for the worker bee. During the first couple weeks of her life, the worker bee removes any bees that have died and disposes of the corpses as far from the hive as possible. Similarly, diseased or dead brood are quickly removed before becoming a health threat to the colony.
Working in the nursery (Days 4 to 12): The young worker bees tend to their baby sisters by feeding and caring for the developing larvae. On average, nurse bees check a single larva 1,300 times a day. The number of days spent tending brood depends on the number of brood in the hive and the urgency of other competing tasks.
Attending royalty (Days 7 to 12): Because her royal highness is unable to tend to her most basic needs by herself, some of the workers do these tasks for her. They groom and feed the queen and even remove her excrement from the hive. These royal attendants also coax the queen to continue to lay eggs as she moves about the hive.
Stocking the pantry (Days 12 to 18): In the hive, worker house bees take nectar or pollen from foraging field bees returning to the hive. These bees deposit the pollen and nectar into cells earmarked for this purpose.To the pollen, they add nectar and their saliva, which contains enzymes that inoculate the pollen with natural probiotic bacteria and the yeasts and sugars necessary to jumpstart the fermentation of pollen into the highly nutritious and protein rich beebread.To the nectar, they add saliva (enzymes) and set about fanning the nectar cells continuously to reduce the water content, eventually turning the watery nectar into thick, sweet, ripened honey with a moisture content of 17–18 percent.
Fanning (Days 12 to 18): Worker bees also take a turn at controlling the temperature and humidity of the hive. During warm weather they fan furiously at the hive’s entrance to draw air into the hive. Additional fanners are in position within the hives. In addition to cooling the hive, the fanning hastens the evaporation of excess moisture from the curing honey.
Becoming architects and master builders (Days 12 to 35): Worker bees that are about 12 days old are mature enough to begin producing beeswax. These white flakes of wax are secreted from wax glands on the underside of the worker bee’s abdomen. They help with the building of new wax comb and in the capping of ripened honey and brood cells containing developing pupae.
Guarding the home (Days 18 to 21): The last task of a house bee before she ventures out is that of guarding the hive. At this stage of maturity, her sting glands have developed to contain an authoritative amount of venom. You can easily spot the guard bees at the hive’s entrance. They are poised and alert, checking each bee that returns to the hive for a familiar scent. Only family members are allowed to pass.
Field bees (Days 21 till death): When the worker bee is a few weeks old, she ventures outside the hive to perform her last and perhaps most important job — to collect the pollen and nectar that will sustain the colony. With her life half over, she joins the ranks of other field bees until she reaches the end of her life, some three weeks later.
Understanding the Composition of Honey
Honey is the sweet result of the bees magically transforming the nectar they gather from flowers. Honey is about 80 percent fructose and glucose, and between 17 and 18 percent water. Maintaining