How Bees Make Honey

A jar of sunshine

Have you ever spread golden, sticky honey on your toast? That sweet treat was made by tiny insects called honeybees. Making honey takes thousands of bees, millions of flowers, and a lot of clever teamwork. Let's follow the journey from a flower to the honey jar.

It all starts with a flower

Deep inside many flowers is a sweet, sugary liquid called nectar. Flowers make nectar on purpose, to tempt insects to visit. A honeybee flies from flower to flower, and at each one it sips up the nectar using a long tongue, almost like drinking through a straw.

The bee stores this nectar in a special part of its body called the honey stomach. This is not the same as the stomach it uses for its own food. It is more like a tiny shopping bag for carrying nectar. A busy worker bee will visit hundreds of flowers before her honey stomach is full.

While she is busy drinking nectar, something else important is happening. Yellow dust called pollen sticks to her furry body. When she flies to the next flower, some of that pollen rubs off. This is called pollination, and it helps the plants make seeds and fruit. So bees help flowers at the same time as the flowers help bees!

Back to the hive

When her honey stomach is full, the bee flies home to the hive, where the whole bee family lives. But how does she find her way, and how do the other bees know where the best flowers are?

Honeybees have an amazing way of talking to each other. When a bee finds a great patch of flowers, she does a special waggle dance back at the hive. She wiggles her body and moves in a figure-eight shape. The direction she dances and how long she waggles tells the other bees exactly which way to fly and how far the flowers are. It is like giving directions without using any words!

Turning nectar into honey

Now comes the clever part. The nectar that bees collect is very watery and thin. Honey is thick and sticky. So how do bees change one into the other?

When the bee gets back to the hive, she passes the nectar from her mouth to the mouth of another worker bee. That bee passes it on again, and again. Each time, the bees add special juices from their bodies that begin to change the nectar, breaking down the sugars so the honey will keep for a long time.

Next, the bees spread the nectar into little six-sided wax cups called honeycomb. Then they do something surprising: they flap their wings over the honeycomb, fanning it like hundreds of tiny fans. This blowing of air removes the water from the nectar, making it thicker and thicker. Slowly, the watery nectar turns into golden, sticky honey.

When the honey is just right, the bees seal each little cell with a cap of wax to keep it fresh, like putting a lid on a tiny jar.

Why do bees make honey?

Bees do not make honey for our toast! They make it as food for themselves. In summer there are lots of flowers, so there is plenty of nectar. But in winter, the cold weather means no flowers bloom and there is nothing to collect. The bees stay snug inside the hive and eat the honey they stored up over the summer. It keeps the whole colony alive until spring.

Bees are wonderful workers. One little worker bee makes only about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her whole life. That means it takes the work of thousands and thousands of bees to fill a single jar.

Watch the bees

On a warm, sunny day, find some flowers in a garden or park and watch quietly. Can you spot a bee landing on a flower? Watch how it climbs right inside to reach the nectar. Look at its furry body, and see if you can spot tiny lumps of yellow pollen stuck to its back legs, called pollen baskets.

Never touch or chase a bee, just watch. Bees only sting if they feel scared, so if you stay calm and still, you can enjoy watching them work. Try counting how many flowers one bee visits in a minute!

Bees are amazing minibeasts. Meet more tiny creatures in Minibeasts and Bugs. And to see another insect that changes as it grows, read The Life Cycle of a Butterfly.