How Bees Make Honey

30 How Bees Make Honey Some people say honey is a health food. Put it on a cut and it will help the cut heal quickly. Eat it, and it will boost your natural ability to fight off infections. The ancient Egyptian kings put honey inside their tombs to take along to the afterlife. That was thousands of years ago. Today, when the tombs are opened, the honey is good to eat. It has nutritional value too. Honey is a very special food. Bees eat it, and so do humans. But what is honey? Where does it come from? How is it made? You probably know that bees make honey. Not all bees though. Only one special kind of bee-the honeybee- makes honey. Here's how they do it. Flowers have a special relationship with bees. They make a sweet liquid called “ nectar" . It’s 80 percent water. Special bees collect this nectar to make honey. These special bees have long tongues. They use their tongues to suck the sweet liquid from the flowers.

The bees that collect nectar have two stomachs. One stomach is used only for storing the nectar. When this stomach is full of nectar, it weighs almost as much as the bee. It can take up to one thousand flowers to fill the nectar stomach of a collecting bee. Imagine that! It's a lot of flowers to visit. At the hive where the bees live, another kind of bee, a worker bee puts its tongue inside the nectar bee and sucks the sweet water from its nectar stomach. The worker bee chews on the nectar for an hour. It then spreads the nectar in the hive. Using its wings as a fan, the bee causes the water to evaporate from the nectar. lt then becomes the thick, sweet syrup that we call honey. Honey provides food for all the bees in the hive. In a year, a colony of bees eats about 150 pounds of honey. That's a lot of honey to make! Some humans keep bees, take the honey from the hive and sell it. That's how we get honey. You might say that bees, flowers and people work together to make one of nature's special foods.