How is Honey made?

As my project is on re-branding Hillview Honey Jars, I decided it was important for me to have some knowledge behind how honey is made and some bee facts. A quick google search taught me...

Honey gets its start as flower nectar, which is collected by bees, naturally broken down into simple sugars and stored in honeycombs. The unique design of the honeycomb, coupled with constant fanning by the bees' wings, causes evaporation to take place, creating the thick, sweet liquid we know as honey.

Bee Facts

• Honey bees live in hives (or colonies). The members of the hive are divided into three types:

1) Queen: One queen runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behaviour of the other bees. 

2) Workers: these are all female and their roles are to forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean and circulate air by beating their wings. Workers are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside the hive. 3) Drones: These are the male bees, and their purpose is to mate with the new queen. Several hundred live in each hive during the spring and summer. But come winter, when the hive goes into survival mode, the drones are kicked out!

•  If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called 'royal jelly'. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.

• Honey bees are excellent flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second.

• Each bee has 170 odorant receptors, which means they have one serious sense of smell! They use this to communicate within the hive and to recognise different types of flowers when looking for food.

• The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

• The queen can live up to five years - busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day! 

• Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as 'colony collapse disorder', billions of Honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return.