Bees turn watery nectar into honey by blowing bubbles and fanning wings
Flower nectar is about three-quarters water. Honey is less than a fifth. Bees close that gap with teamwork: relays of workers regurgitate nectar into bubbles to evaporate it, then heat and fan the hive until the sugar is so concentrated that microbes simply cannot grow. Properly stored, it never goes off.
A forager sucks nectar into a special honey stomach that holds about 40 milligrams, roughly half the insect's own weight; filling it may take visits to more than a thousand flowers. Enzymes from the bee's glands begin splitting sucrose into glucose and fructose on the flight home. Back at the hive, the load passes to house bees, who repeatedly form bubbles between their mandibles, exposing a large surface to the warm air, and hand the liquid along in relays for up to 20 minutes.
The fresh honey goes into open wax cells still up to 70 percent water, wet enough for yeasts to ferment it. Here bees use a talent rare among insects: making their own heat. They hold honey-storage areas at around 35 °C and beat their wings in unison to push moist air out of the hive. When the water falls to between 15.5 and 18 percent, the sugar is far more concentrated than water could normally dissolve, fermentation stops, and the cells are capped with wax.
That chemistry is why honey keeps. Its sugar load and acidity starve microbes, and samples found by archaeologists have proven edible after thousands of years, although claims of edible honey from Egyptian tombs turned out to be other substances or only chemical traces. The weak point is moisture: honey draws water from damp air, and once diluted enough it can ferment.
People have raided hives for at least 8,000 years, as cave paintings at Cuevas de la Araña in Spain show, and the Maya kept stingless bees before Columbus. Beekeepers exploit swarming, when half a colony leaves with the old queen and becomes unusually docile, and they keep colonies from leaving by adding empty boxes called supers. Smoke calms the bees by triggering a feeding instinct and masking their alarm signals. An average hive yields about 29 kilograms a year.
Source: Honey
