Did you know that to make a kilogram (about two pounds) of honey, bees require about 130,000 loads of nectar, that’s 10 million visits to individual flowers. If the flowers are within a mile of the hive, the bees will fly to visit the flowers covering a distance of about 400,000 kilometers, the equivalent of circling 10 times around the earth.

Just a thought about how much work bees go through to make honey, which is really just regurgitated bee spit, the sweet nectar reward plants offer pollinators especially bees in this case is stored in the bees “honey stomach”. Since the nectar collected by bees is about 90% water, the bees must concentrate the sugary solution by regurgitating it in nectar droplets on their tongue, where the water content is evaporated with each regurgitation, about 200 times to aerate and distill the nectar to its honey like consistency.

The process is aided internally, by enzymes in the bee’s stomach which breakdown the complex disaccharides and polysaccharides into simple sugars like fructose and glucose. Externally, worker bees rapidly beat their wings (about 26,400 times a minute) to circulate air throughout the hive, accelerating the drying process. This premature honey is placed into the wax cells and capped, in the cells the honey will continue to lose water until it reaches the consistency we all recognize as honey.