Honey
Honey is a sweet, sticky substance. Several species of bees make it. The best-known are honey bees. Bees make and store honey to nourish their colonies.
Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions. They feed on plant nectar. They also eat the secretions of other insects,
like aphid honeydew. This refinement takes place both in individual bees. This happens through regurgitation and enzymes. It also happens during storage
in the hive. This happens through water. Evaporation that concentrates the honey's sugars until it is thick and viscous.
Honey bees stockpile honey in the hive. Within the hive is a structure made from wax called honeycomb. The bees make the honeycomb. Hundreds or thousands of
hexagonal cells make it up. The bees regurgitate honey into them to store it. Other honey-producing species Bees store the substance in different structures.
These include pots made of wax and resin used by the stingless bee.
People collect honey for eating from wild bee colonies. They also get it from the hives of domesticated bees. The honey produced by Honey bees are the most
familiar to humans. This is thanks to their worldwide commercial production and availability. Beekeeping is the care of bees. Stingless bees are usually called
meliponiculture.
Honey is sweet. This is due to its high levels of the sugars fructose and glucose. It has about the same relative Sweetness comes from sucrose, or table sugar.
Honey has about 190 kilojoules (46 kilocalories) per tablespoon of food energy. It has good properties for baking and a unique flavor as a sweetener.
Most microorganisms cannot grow in honey and sealed honey thus does not spoil. Samples of honey discovered in archaeological contexts have proven edible even after millennia.
People have used honey and made it for a long time. It has had a varied history. It began in prehistoric times. Several cave paintings in Cuevas de la Araña in Spain
They depict humans foraging for honey at least 8,000 years ago. Apis melifera is an Old World insect. People in the New World did large-scale meliponiculture.
The Mayans have been practicing beekeeping with stingless bees since pre-Columbian times.
By other insects
Honey bees are not the only eusocial insects to produce honey. All non-parasitic bumblebees and stingless bees produce honey. Some wasp species, such as Brachygastra
Lecheguana and Brachygastra mellifica inhabit South and Central America. They are famous for feeding on nectar and making honey. Active sentence:
People know them for feeding on nectar and producing honey. Active sentence: We know that they feed on nectar and produce honey.Other wasps, such as Polistes
versicolor, also consume honey. In the middle of their lives, they switch to eating pollen, which is rich in protein, and honey. Honey is a far denser source of
food energy.
Human intervention
Humans have semi-domesticated some species of honey bee. They do this by using their swarming stage. Swarming is the means by which new colonies are established
when there is no longer space for expansion in the colony's present hive. The old queen lays eggs that will develop into new queens and then leads as many as half
the colony to a site for a new hive. Bees generally swarm before scouts find a suitable new hive location sent out for this purpose. The swarm will wait until they
find a location. They will gather near the former hive, often on tree branches. These swarms are docile and amenable to transport by humans. When given a good
nesting site, like a Langstroth hive, the swarm will form a new colony in artificial surroundings. These semi-domesticated colonies are then looked after by
humans practicing apiculture or meliponiculture. We encourage captured bees to forage. Places like orchards, where people value pollinators, are often where they
do this. The honey, pollen, wax and resins the bees produce are all harvested by humans for a variety of uses.
Formation
By honey bees
Bees produce honey by collecting nectar or honeydew. Bees value honey for its sugars. They eat it to fuel their metabolism especially that of their flight
muscles during foraging, and as a food for their larvae. To this end bees stockpile honey to provide for themselves during they use nectar for flying.
This happens during normal foraging and lean times, like in overwintering muscles. Most nectar collected does not nourish the insects.
Instead, it is for regurgitation, enzymatic digestion, and finally long-term storage as honey. During cold weather or when food is scarce,
adult and larval bees eat the honey. It is much more. It is made from nectar that is energy-dense.
After leaving the hive a foraging bee collects sugar-rich nectar or honeydew. Nectar from the flower generally has a water content of 70 to 80% and is much less It is
more viscous than finished honey. Honey usually has 18% water. Honeydew from aphids and other true bugs has very high water close to the sap on which those insects
feed and is usually somewhat more dilute than nectar. One source describes the water content of honeydew as around 89%. The bee feeds on nectar or honeydew.
It sucks these runny fluids through its proboscis. The proboscis delivers the liquid to the bee's honey stomach or "honey crop". This cavity lies above its food
stomach. The stomach digests pollen and sugars that a honey bee eats for its own nourishment.
In Apis mellifera the honey stomach holds about 40 mg of liquid. This is about half the weight of an unladen bee. Collecting this quantity in nectar can need visits
to more than a thousand flowers. When nectar is plentiful, it can take a bee over an hour of nonstop work to collect enough nectar to fill its honey crop. Salivary
enzymes and proteins from the bee's hypopharyngeal gland go into the nectar. This happens once the nectar is in the bee's honey stomach. These substances begin it
cleaves complex sugars, like sucrose and starches, into simpler sugars. These include glucose and fructose. This process raises the water content and the acidity
of the digested nectar.
Once filled, the forager bees return to the hive. There they regurgitate and transfer nectar to hive bees. Once in their own honey stomachs the hive bees regurgitate
the nectar, forming bubbles between their mandibles, speeding its digestion and concentration. These bubbles create a large surface area per volume and by this means
the bees evaporate a part of the nectar's water into the warm air of the hive.
Hive bees form honey processing groups. These groups work in relay. One bee bubbles the nectar. Then, it passes the refined liquid onto others. The process can take
up to 20 minutes. It involves continuous regurgitation, digestion, and evaporation until the product reaches storage quality. The new honey is ...They then place the
larvae in honeycomb cells and leave them uncapped. This honey still has much water, up to 70%. The amount depends on the nectar's concentration. At this stage,
the honey has a lot of water. Yeast spores can grow in it. If unchecked, would eat the new honey's sugars fast. To fight this, bees have a rare ability among
insects: making heat inside their bodies.
Bees are among the few insects that can create large amounts of body heat. They use this ability to produce a constant ambient temperature in their hives. Hive
temperatures are usually around 35 °C (95 °F) in the honey-storage areas. They either regulate this temperature by generating heat with their bodies or...removing it
through water evaporation. The evaporation removes water from the stored honey, drawing heat from the colony. The bees use their wings to govern hive cooling.
Coordinated wing beating moves air across the wet honey, drawing out water and heat. Ventilation of the hive expels both excess water and heat into the outside world.
Evaporation continues until the honey is 15.5% to 18% water. This makes the sugars much more concentrated. This point is the saturation point of water. There is
much more sugar in the remaining water in honey. It is more than could ever dissolve in an equal amount of water volume of water. Honey is a supercooled solution.
It has various sugars in water. It is in the hive and very cold. These concentrations of sugar can only be the bees achieve the near room temperature by
evaporating weaker nectar. For osmotic reasons such high concentrations of sugar are the conditions are very bad for microbes. So, all fermentation stops.
The bees then cap the cells of finished honey with wax. This seals them from contamination and prevents further evaporation.
Honey lasts forever if its water level stays under 18%. This is true in the hive and after a beekeeper takes it
We prefer the term "semi-domesticated." This is because all bee colonies leave their hives. This includes those in very large agriculture operations.of humans in
swarms that can establish successful wild colonies. Commercial beekeepers dedicate much of their effort to persuading a ready hiveto swarm to produce more honeycomb
in its present location. This is usually done by adding more space to the colony with honey supers, empty boxes placed ontop of an existing colony. One can usually
lure the bees to use this empty space. This stops them from dividing their colony through swarming.
Worldwide production
In 2020, global honey production was 1.8 million tonnes. China led with 26% of the world total (table). Other major producers were Turkey, Iran, and Argentina and
Ukraine.