How do honeybees make honey?

When it comes to making honey, bees are skilled chemists. Discover how they use enzymes to turn sugary flower nectar into a sweet, stable food source in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how stuff Works dot com
where smart Happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question,
how do honey bees make honey? A honey bee starts
the honeymaking process by visiting a flower and gathering some

(00:22):
of its nectar. Many plants use nectar as a way
of attracting insects like bees, wasps, and butterflies to stop
at the flower. In the process of gathering the nectar,
the insect transfers pollen grains from one flower to another
and pollinates the flower. Most flower nectars are similar to
sugar water sucros mixed with a lot of water. Nectars

(00:46):
can contain other beneficial substances as well. To make honey,
two things have to happen. First, enzymes that the bees
produced turn the sucros, which is a die sac ride,
into glucose, which is a monos sac ride. Second, most
of the moisture has to be evaporated out of the nectar,
leaving only about eighteen percent water in honey. The enzyme

(01:09):
is called invertase. It breaks sucrose, which is generally made
of two glucose molecules apart, into their separate glucose molecules.
Another enzymes that the bees produce is able to convert
some of the glucose into gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide,
both of which act as preservatives. Bees evaporate the water

(01:30):
out of the honey by putting small drops of it
on the comb and fanning it with their wings. The
effect is to make honey a very stable food. It
naturally resists mold, fungi, and other bacteria, allowing it to
last for years without refrigeration. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works, dot

(01:50):
com