A colony of honey bees is like a small factory. These insects are at work everyday to produce a product that may be familiar to you. This sweet, thick product is called honey. What most people dont know is the story behind it all. There is more to the honey making process than what meets the tounge. There are three main steps to the process. The first is gathering the nectar, second is enzymes, and third is evaporation.
Honey bees use nectar to make honey. Nectar comes from many of the flowers you see outside. It is made up of eighty percent water with some complex sugars. Most flower nectars are similar to sugar water and made up of a mixture between sucrose and water. In North America honey bees will collect nectar from common flowers such as clovers, dandelions, berry bushes and fruit tree blossoms. In order to collect the nectar the bees will travel up to one and one half miles in all directions. When they get to the flowers they use their long, tubelike tounges like straws to suck the nectar out of flowers and they store it in their "honey stomachs". Their honey stomachs will hold up to seventy miligrams of nectar. The bees will visit 100-1500 flowers to get this amount of nectar. Gathering the nectar is the first step in making honey.
Enzymes in a bees stomach and mouth are an important to honey bees. The enzymes convert the complex surcoses stored in the stomach into two simple six-carbon sugars, glucose and fructose. A small amount of the glucose is attacked by a second enzyme, glucose oxidase, and converted into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. The gluconic acid makes honey an acid medium with with a low p.H. that can not be attacked by bacteria and is easier for the bees to digest. The hydrogen peroxide gives the honey short-range protection against bacteria also. After the sugar is broken down by the enzymes, there is only one step left until you have honey.
