• Brief history of honey
• Honey an health
• Honey and cooking

HONEY - HOW IS IT MADE?

• The beehive is considered to be one of the most proficient factories on earth and bees need to gather nectar from around two million flowers in order to create a mere pound of honey. To achieve this remarkable feat of nature, the bees have to cover a massive distance ­ around 90,000 miles in total!



• On average, one honeybee will only actually make a 12th of a teaspoon of honey in its life but will visit as many as 50 to 100 flowers on each nectar-gathering excursion. Bees can travel up to six miles when collecting nectar, although one to two miles is usually the norm. The magnitude of this is breathtaking when taking into consideration the fact that one million tons of honey is produced every year around the world.



• Once a bee locates a rich source of nectar it returns to the hive and informs the colony of the location by positioning its body in relation to the sun and the flower and performing a ‘dance’. This points the colony in the right direction of the source and the type of dance performed determines the distance.


Social interaction and organisation are the key elements needed for a colony of honeybees to thrive. The social structure of a honeybee colony is as follows:

Queen Bee: the only reproductive female and the mother of the entire colony. The Queen can lay in excess of 1500 eggs per day and she controls the sex of her offspring. The Queen can live between one and three years.

Drone: often referred to as the idle bachelor, the male honeybee’s sole purpose is to mate with the queen. Once this has been achieved the Drone perishes almost at once. The Queen mates with six or more Drones over a period of several days.

Worker: the importance of the worker cannot be underestimated and its name is completely self-explanatory. The Workers build and maintain the nests from wax secreted by abdominal glands; monitor and sustain the nest temperature (33.9ºC); evaporate water from the nectar to transform it to honey; and defend the colony with their lives, armed with stingers. The Workers leave the hive to collect nectar, pollen, water and so on. On top of all this they’re responsible for feeding the whole colony, cleaning the nest and caring for the young. Obviously this is not all performed at once, rather each bee graduates from task to task starting as a cleaner then moving on to nurse, then honey and beeswax makers. Finally, the Worker bees become guardians of the hive before they can leave to scout or forage for nectar. Each colony consists of tens of thousands of Worker bees. On average, Workers live for six weeks but if they are born late in the season they will live until the spring, as they are unable to work until then.

• The purpose of honey manufacture is to feed the colony over the winter months. Each hive needs 20 to 30 pounds of honey to last an average winter although a strong bee colony usually produces up to three times that amount. This additional quantity of honey is what we harvest for consumption.



• The process of making honey goes as follows:
  - Once a bee colony has been established (within a nest in the wild or in a hive for commercial honey production) the scouting Worker bees go to look for the nearest source of nectar.
  - With the nectar supply successfully found, the scouts return to the hive to inform the foragers of its whereabouts by performing their ‘dance’ and by passing around a small taste of the nectar.
  - This is where the colony’s work begins in earnest. The foragers fly off to the source and return to the hive with the nectar stored in a special sac.
  - Returning to the hive, the foragers pass the nectar to the indoor Worker bees. Inside, the nectar is transferred from mouth to mouth until its moisture content has evaporated to less than 20%. With the inclusion of special enzymes, this course of action is what changes the nectar to honey.
  - The honey is then placed in the storage cells (that ultimately form the honeycomb) before being sealed with a little wax cap.



• For commercial distribution, honey is taken directly from the ‘manufacturer’ and the taste of honey from the jar is how it tastes straight from the comb. Honey is blessed with being a natural biological product and its combination of at least 180 substances and essences has ensured that it cannot be reproduced artificially nor synthesised in any way. There are hundreds of apiaries all across the world working to meet the global demand for honey.



• Not only are honeybees responsible for creating such a wonderful natural food supply, they are also the predominant reason why the human race has access to other food sources. Bees pollinate at least 80% of the total insect-pollinated plants, which form a third of our diet. Bees need pollen to feed their young and, by gathering that which they need, they fertilise (i.e. the act of pollination) each flowering plant they visit in search of nectar, more pollen and so on. During its foraging, one bee can in fact pollinate around 18,000 flowers per day.



• Don’t forget that honeybees perform a remarkable service to us and be careful not to kill any if you encounter them. If they fly anywhere near you ­ don’t panic! They aren’t aggressive and will only sting as a last resort, which is usually a consequence of provocation. Bees will soon fly off when they realise that you don’t have any nectar or pollen, as they aren’t interested in anything else. They’re doing us a favour so remember to be nice to bees!