How is real honey made?

Honey is the product of a wonderful collaboration between bees, flowers and people. Flowers secrete a fragrant solution – nectar. Special glands that produce nectar are called nectaries and are located deep inside the flowers. By producing nectar, plants attract insects that pollinate them. Worker bees suck the nectar with their tongues and store it in their honey stomach, which they then pass on to young worker bees in the hive, after which they return to collect it.

In order for bees to produce one kilogram of ripe honey, it is necessary to collect at least three times as much nectar. For this, 200,000 bees leave the apiary. And only one bee goes around 150 flowers to fill the honey stomach and transfer the load to the hive.

While they are collecting, young worker bees add enzymes to the nectar by stirring it in their mouths for about twenty minutes, which causes the sucrose in the nectar to separate into glucose and fructose. After that, the worker bees deposit the nectar in the cells of the honeycomb so that the water evaporates and it thickens. When the mixture is thick enough, the worker bees chew it again and only then does the state we call honey form. The honey is then placed in a honey depositing station and covered with wax. This way, it is stored to preserve the essential oils from the nectar, and the bees open it and use it as needed.

Since bees produce more honey than they need during the honey season (spring and summer), humans use the excess for their own needs. It is believed that a bee colony needs between 80 and 120 kilograms of honey per year to function normally.

People use honey because it is a food rich in energy and one of the healthiest foods in the world. Honey is thus one of the most perfect products of nature and it contains almost all the ingredients that build the human body. And the bees, because of this borrowing of their products, are not angry with people, because the beekeepers in turn take care of them and the apiaries.