The honey bee, scientific name apis mellifera, has been around for about thirty million years!  Honey bees are the only insects that produce food eaten by humans.  A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip.  The average honey bee will actually make only one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime.  Are bees born knowing how to make honey?  No – younger bees are taught by the more experienced ones.  The actual process of transforming the flower nectar into honey requires teamwork.  Older workers do the foraging and bring the nectar back to the hive.  Younger hive bees complete the task of turning it into honey.

First, worker bees fly out from the hive in search of nectar-rich flowers.  Using its straw-like proboscis, a worker bee drinks the liquid nectar and stores it in a special stomach called the honey stomach.  The bee continues to forage until its honey stomach is full. Enzymes in the honey stomach break down the complex sugars of the nectar into simpler sugars, which are less prone to crystallization.

The worker bee heads back the hive with her full belly and regurgitates the already modified nectar for a hive bee.  The hive bee ingests the sugar, further breaks it down, and then regurgitates the converted nectar into a cell of the honeycomb.

Then the hive bees beat their wings furiously over the nectar to evaporate the remaining water content.  As the water evaporates, the sugars thicken into honey.  Once the honey is finished, the hive bee caps the beeswax cell, sealing the honey into the honeycomb for later consumption by humans or bees.  Bees eat honey and stored pollen during the winter months.