Honey is a simple pleasure. It’s easy to forget, while enjoying its luxurious fragrant sweetness on a slice of buttered toast, that it is the end-product of a sophisticated production line involving state-of-the-art biological machinery and thousands of skilled workers.
Honey starts out as nectar, a rather dilute solution of various sugars that flowering plants produce to attract pollinating insects. Most of these visitors drink it down on the spot as sustenance for themselves. A foraging worker bee, though, does things differently.
After sucking it out of the flower with its straw-like proboscis, the bee deposits the nectar in its proventriculus or honey stomach. This can hold a lot of nectar – up to almost half the bee’s unloaded body mass – and filling it may require a thousand flower visits. The transformation of nectar into honey begins while the bee is still on the wing, as the proventriculus produces enzymes that break down the larger, complex sugar molecules into smaller ones.
On arrival back at the hive, the forager unloads its cargo by regurgitating the sugary solution to other workers, who pass it back and forth between each other, adding more enzymes each time and frothing it up with their mouthparts to encourage the evaporation of water.
Once it is sufficiently sticky and viscous, the concoction is laid down in the beeswax cells of the honeycomb and the workers continue the drying process by fanning it with their wings. Only when the water content has been reduced to about 18 per cent (from about 75 per cent in the original nectar), do they seal the cells with beeswax lids. At this point, it is well and
