Bees visit thousands of flowers and fly vast distances to produce the honey we consume daily. Picture: Kathy_Büscher/pixabay
The journey of honey from flower to jar is an extraordinary feat of nature, requiring remarkable cooperation, precision, and effort from bees.
Honey production is a result of meticulous teamwork within a hive, where each bee plays a vital role in converting nectar into the golden liquid prized worldwide.
For a single teaspoon of honey, a bee must visit approximately 5,000 flowers. This effort requires flying nearly 80 kilometres, totalling around 55,000 combined flight hours when factoring in the work of an entire hive.
Each bee produces only about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime, it will take 12 bees their entire lives to produce a teaspoon of honey. Granted, the typical worker bee lives for around five to six weeks.
Bees collect nectar from flowers using their specialised tongues and store it in their honey stomachs, separate from their main stomachs.
Upon returning to the hive, the nectar is passed mouth-to-mouth among worker bees, reducing its water content and transforming it into a thicker substance. Once deposited into honeycomb cells, bees fan their wings to further evaporate moisture, ensuring the honey's preservation.
The purpose of honey production is survival. Bees create honey as a long-term food source, particularly to sustain their colony during winter months when flowers are scarce. This natural storage system is essential for maintaining hive strength and productivity.
Bees will produce honey indefinitely. A natural hive, usually built on branches of a tree or on a cliffside, will have the space to expand without the bees having to find a new location.
If a beekeeper doesn’t harvest the honey, the colony will probably swarm as it rapidly outgrows the hive. It will search for a new location to start building a new home. If the bees don’t swarm, the excess honey they’re housing could be targeted by other bee colonies and insects like ants.
IOL
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