Is Honey Just Bee Vomit? An In-depth Look into How Honey is Made and Harvested
Have you ever wondered, "Is honey bee vomit?" This often comes up when discussing the fascinating process of honey production. To fully understand the journey from flower to jar, it's essential to explore how honey is made and how it is harvested. By delving into these topics, we can appreciate the intricate and meticulous work of honey bees that culminates in the sweet, golden substance we all enjoy.
Honey Extraction at Buddha Bee Apiary
We've created a short video showcasing our honey harvesting process at Buddha Bee Apiary. While we're not a commercial honey business, we provide our hosts with honey directly from their own backyard hives. As long as the hive produces enough excess honey, we extract it from capped honey frames and return it to our hosts. We take pride in meticulously giving our hosts back their exact honey! We label everything with their names; from harvested boxes to filtering buckets and the of course the final bottled honey. Honey is the only food on Earth that will not spoil! However, to maintain quality, we extract all harvested honey frames within 7-10 days to prevent pest invasions.
Before Extraction: The Intricate Work of Honey Bees
Why do Honey Bees Make Honey?
Honey isn't merely sustenance for honey bees; it's meticulously stored nourishment. During the plentiful nectar sources of spring and summer, honey bees tirelessly gather enough food to last the entire year. A floral scarcity referred to as "the dearth" sets in by mid to late summer, and so comes with it a pause in the honey stowing process. In North Carolina, honey bees rely on their stockpile honey from around August through February (the months can change depending on seasonal patterns in different regions). Strong honey reserves are crucial during these periods when flowers stop blooming, ensuring survival through lean times.
Colony size plays a crucial role in honey gathering: larger colonies typically store more honey, whereas smaller ones often require additional support. Additionally, certain queen genetics or honey bee strains can result in colonies that prioritize honey production, leading to variations in honey yields among colonies. Besides internal colony dynamics, climate change and habitat loss significantly affect the floral density accessible to honey bees. As weather patterns shift and natural habitats give way to man-made structures, the availability of forage for honey bees typically changes or diminishes. The average forage range for honey bees spans 3-4 miles, meaning the location of a hive and its surroundings can significantly influence its success. As beekeepers, we occasionally need to supplement nourishment with sugar water if a colony is struggling to accumulate sufficient honey stores for overwintering.
What is Honey Made of?
Honey bees have two food sources—nectar and pollen— both of which come from most flowers (sometimes flowering plants only produce one or the other or none at all!) Foragers are believed to start by collecting only nectar and gradually advance to gathering both pollen and nectar. Collecting pollen might be more challenging, so only the most experienced foragers take on this task. Additionally, having foragers collect pollen only near the end of their lives could help balance the high demand for honey with the lesser demand for pollen.
Bee bread is most often yellow and orange, but sometimes we see red, green, and even white!
Pollen is the honey bees’ protein source, and it gets turned into “bee bread.” Honey bees collect pollen and store it in their pollen baskets on their hind legs. Upon returning to the hive, they mix the pollen granules with their saliva before placing it into cells. This process actually ferments and preserves the pollen, since honey bee saliva has bacteria and yeast naturally present. Honey bees rely on the same genus of yeast humans use to make foods such as sourdough bread and beer! Usually, bee bread is in the broods’ nest, where the queen is located and laying all her eggs. This is because pollen provides the biggest protein source for honey bees, which is needed during their early developmental and young adult stages of life.
When a forager lands on a flower, her hairs become covered in sticky pollen. She then scrapes the pollen back to her hind legs, which have specialized "pollen baskets" called corbiculae. She packs the pollen into these baskets, moistening it with nectar and saliva to form compact pellets that stay in place during flight.
Nectar is the honey bees’ carbohydrate source, which they turn into honey. It is a sugary liquid produced by some plants, with the primary sugar being sucrose. In totality honey contains sugar, water, enzymes, minerals, vitamins, traces of pollen, and amino acids (protein building blocks). In its final form, honey has less than 18% water, but water usually makes up around 80% of nectar! Once honey bees work their magic and dehydrate nectar to such an extreme percentage, the final product has many sugars and complex molecules that prevent degradation over time. Through the supersaturation process, honey bees are also creating a natural antibacterial and antioxidant that will not ferment or support microbial life (if stored and harvested properly). This is why at Buddha Bee we do not harvest frames that have greater than an 18% water content!
The beautiful, fresh white capping signifies <18% water content, whereas the shiny, open cells holding nectar still have too much water to be considered finished honey.
How is Honey Made?
1. A honey bee forages from flowers, often collecting both nectar and pollen. Honey bees have a tongue called a proboscis, which is long and slender enough to reach the nectary of plants at the base of a flower’s stamen.
2. To transport the nectar back to the hive, a honey bees stores up to 60mg of nectar in her honey stomach (worker bees only weigh around 100mg!). The honey stomach is not part of the honey bees’ digestive system— it does not digest the nectar for immediate energy usage but instead acts as a temporary holding sac. Honey bees do have a second stomach/intestine that is used to digest honey, nectar, and pollen consumed as a food source.
3. During the flight back to the hive, the enzyme Invertase begins to break down sucrose into simpler sugars: glucose and fructose. This process helps begin the dehydration of nectar, since the reaction of breaking down sucrose “uses up” water.
4. Upon arriving back to the hive, forager bees pass the contents of their honey stomach to younger worker bees who are not yet foraging. This nectar gets passed mouth-to-mouth between hundreds of worker bees, and each pass increases the presence of Invertase and decreases the water content ever so slightly. This process also allows for the bees to share healthy gut microbes with each other!
5. As the nectar gets close to 18% water content, the last worker bee will go to a honey cell and deposit tiny drops—it takes many forages to fill just one cell. A single worker bee will create about seven drops of honey in her lifetime. This amount would fill only two and a half cells! Another way to think about it is that it takes 12 honey bee lifetimes to make a teaspoon of honey!
6. To further decrease the water content of the honey, worker bees will fan their wings over the honey cells to help the evaporation process. Once the honey has the perfect water content and viscosity, the worker bees will place a wax capping over each individual cell. The result is a beautiful, capped frame such as this one. Remember, honey is the only food on Earth that doesn’t spoil!
So…Is Honey Just Bee Vomit?
The honey stomach acts as a holding sac where nectar is stored without being digested, making honey more of a "regurgitation" than vomit. Enzymes like invertase in the honey stomach break down complex sugars into simpler sugars, which definitely sounds like a digestive process! Although these enzymes initiate the breakdown of nectar, it is not digested for immediate energy production by the worker bee who is holding the nectar.
Occasionally, a foraging honey bee will allow a small amount of nectar to pass into her midgut for immediate consumption and generation of energy, but once in the midgut, the nectar cannot be regurgitated. Nectar is not the final, preferred food source for honey bees; they usually first transform it into honey. Some might argue that "regurgitated" and "vomited" are synonymous, but the difference lies in the distinct organs honey bees use to hold nectar versus digest (usually) honey. However, it is also okay to agree to disagree…!