Facts Explained: Making Honey from Nectar

Posted on 16th Sep 2020

Post Category: Animal Science

Flower nectar is complete liquid. How do honeybees transform it into dense, yummy honey?

When nectar is collected from the plants it is watery solution of various sugars. Cane sugar or sucrose is most common in most nectars. The other sugars are fructose and glucose. Then how it gets converted to dense honey by honeybees? Read here how.

Nectar from each kind of flower has its own characteristic composition, but its strength (i.e. the water content) varies according to the humidity of the air.

Bees usually only collect nectar if it has a sugar content of more than twenty per cent. The bee sucks up the nectar and store it into her nectar sacs which is a special pouch of the food canal. During the process nectar get mixed with an enzyme called as “bee enzyme”, secreted from gland in bee’s mouth. When her nectar “sacs” are full, the honeybee returns to the hive or colony.

• Upon returning to the colony, Nectar is delivered to one of the indoor bees and is then passed mouth-to-mouth from bee to bee. During the processing the bees get rid of most of the water.  They swallow and regurgitate the nectar many times. During process Nector’s water content get reduced from 70% to approx. 20%. This changes the nectar into honey.

• This is then placed into wax cells, called honeycomb. These are hexagonal shaped cells the bees make out of beeswax, and they act like storage jars, which is made of wax.

• Usually the honey stored in these cells stills has bit water in it. Other bees fan their wings at the hive entrance and create a drying breeze through the hive. Which helps water to get evaporate to approx. 17%. The honey then goes into a cell and is later covered with beeswax.

• Raw nectar usually contains a high proportion of sucrose, but honey contains only a few per cent. During the processing and storage, enzymes from the nectar together with others provided by the bees, act upon the sucrose and produce glucose and fructose together with various more complicated sugar.

• The nature of the honey depends upon the sugars present. A high glucose content causes honey to crystallize rapidly whereas a high fructose content makes it runny. Ripe honey is more than 80% sugar, thus making it a good energy-giving food. It is not a complete food, however, because of its law protein content.