What is honey and why do bees make it?

We have one small insect to thank for our UK supermarket aisles lined with jars and bottles of honey – the Western honeybee, Apis mellifera, the most common honeybee in the world.

But honeybees didn’t perfect the art of making honey for our benefit, so why do they produce and store honey and how do they do it?

How do bees make honey?

Stripy black-and-gold honeybees are probably the world’s best-known bees. While thousands of insects help with pollination, honeybees often get most of the credit! As they busily buzz about, they transfer pollen from flower to flower, allowing the plants to reproduce.

At the same time, honeybees also gather pollen in clumps in their corbicula, which are concave structures on their hind legs also known as pollen baskets. This pollen is then carried back to their nest or a human-made hive, providing their colony with important protein, fats and other nutrients.

But it’s not just pollen they’re after! Honeybees are also on the hunt for nectar – an enticing, sweet liquid made by flowers. Nectar gives them energy in the form of carbohydrates. Using their proboscis – a tube-like tongue – they sip up the nectar, collecting enough to sustain themselves, plus extra to bring back to their colony.

Honeybees have two ‘stomachs’. A regular stomach for digesting and a ‘honey stomach’ – a specialised crop for carrying nectar. Their honey stomach doesn’t digest nectar, but the enzymes in it begin breaking the sugars down while other compounds help to preserve the liquid. It depends on the size of the individual, but honeybees have been estimated to typically carry a maximum of around 0.04 milliliters of nectar at a time.

Forager honeybees deliver nectar to other bees in their colony, who store it in honeycomb. At this stage, it’s about 70% water. This is a problem as like this it’s ideal environment for bacteria to thrive. So, to make it last long term, they spend hours fanning their wings over the honey to evaporate some of the water, bringing the moisture levels down to around 18%. Finally, they seal the honeycomb cell with a wax cap.

Why do bees make honey?

Despite how much we love it, honeybees didn’t evolve to make honey for us. It actually plays a really important role in the survival of a bee colony.

Honeybee queens can live up to five years, whereas workers live for up to six weeks in summer and 20 weeks in winter. Neither can survive for long without a sugary boost. Honeybees use honey to top up their energy before they head out to forage. It’s also part of the diet that the colony’s nurse bees feed to the larvae once they’ve hatched.

Honeybees are particularly reliant on their honey stores in winter when there are few days when it’s warm enough to be outside. They’re among the few insects in temperate climates that stay active throughout this period.

When the temperature drops below about 25°C, honey crystallises – you may have spotted this happen to the honey in your kitchen cupboard. Honeybees need honey in its runny liquid form. So, every few days in cooler periods, they gather together in a cluster that reaches about 36°C and they move across their honeycomb. This turns the honey back into a liquid state that they can then suck up using their proboscises.

Typically, honeybees will have used up their honey stockpile by the following spring. However, if they don’t, and no one else consumes it either, honey can last a very long time. Its low moisture levels, high sugar content and antibacterial properties keep it from spoiling. In fact, preserved 5,000-year-old honey was found in Georgia in 2004.

Types of honey

There are numerous varieties of honey, some of which you might be familiar with from the supermarket. Honeys such as orange blossom or acacia are sometimes called monofloral or single-origin.

According to the Confederation of British Industry, to be labelled so, the dominant nectar in these honeys must be from the plant specified on the jar. To achieve this, beekeepers provide their bees with few alternative plants for nectar collection besides the targeted species. They also have to time honey harvesting to coincide with when that plant blooms. However, monofloral honey may still contain some nectar from various other flowers the bees have come across.

Mānuka honey, for example, is made by honeybees predominantly collecting nectar from the flowers of New Zealand’s mānuka tree, Leptospermum scoparium.

Honeybees feeding from one food source has resulted in some quirky situations. In 2012, beekeepers in France found their honeybees producing blue and green honey, instead of the normal golden variety. It turned out they’d been feeding on the colourful, sugary waste from a nearby M&M factory.

Different nectar sources may also play a role in the health of a honeybee colony, impacting toxin tolerance, longevity, immunity and the bees’ stress response. Some honey varieties may even inhibit pathogen growth, such as the bacteria and fungi that cause destructive foulbrood and stonebrood diseases that affect bee larvae.

How do we use honey?

We’ve been seeking out honey since ancient times. For example, in northern Spain, archaeologists have found 7,500-year-old cave paintings depicting ancient humans scaling a rope ladder to gather honey. We also have evidence of honeybee hives that are at least 3,000 years old from the Tel Rehov archaeological site in the Jordan Valley, Israel.

Today there may be as many as 102 million managed Western honeybee hives globally, with this species also found in the wild. In favourable conditions, a honeybee colony can grow to a momentous 50,000 individual bees or more.

China is the world’s leading producer of honey, producing more than 456,000 tonnes of it in 2024. We produce honey here in the UK too, in the same year we produced a little over 10,000 tonnes. The global market value of honey was estimated at around £6.8 billion in 2020, so economically honey is quite important to us.

In fact, the drive to increase honey production actually led to the accidental invention of a species popularly called ‘killer bees’. Also known as Africanised bees, they’re a hybrid of several European honeybees and the African honeybee, Apis mellifera scutellata. The latter is known for being quite aggressive in response to threats and this characteristic is prominent in killer bees too.

But what do we use all this honey for? One popular use is as food, particularly as a tasty natural sweetener. In some cultures, this energy-rich product is a dietary staple. For example, during the Congo Basin’s rainy season, honey makes up 80% of the Mbuti people’s calories. In nearby Tanzania, the Hadza people have a mutualistic relationship with wild birds called honeyguides, which have been helping them find honey possibly for thousands of years.

Honey is also the foundation of a fermented drink called mead, one of the world’s most ancient alcoholic beverages. The oldest evidence we have of honey in a fermented drink is from 7000 BCE China.

We also use honey as medicine. Studies have found that honey can be an effective cough suppressant when taken by children over 12 months old, particularly for the first three days after symptoms appear. Some researchers suggest it could even be a safe alternative to traditional treatments, such as antibiotics, which can be ineffective as upper respiratory tract illnesses are often viral.

Antibiotics are among the most important discoveries of the twentieth century. But their overuse and misuse are contributing to antimicrobial resistance, which is a growing global public health concern. Honey may be able to help us in facing this crisis. Medical grade honeys – such as bioengineered Surgihoney, a gel and wound dressing used for infections, burns, ulcers and surgical wounds – are effective even against some multi-drug-resistant bacteria.

Honey is complex and not a uniform product, and its antimicrobial strength depends on its floral source. In modern times, mānuka honey is perhaps the most famous variety for medicinal applications. You’ll often spot jars of mānuka honey graded by an ‘MGO’ number, which reflects the concentration of a naturally occurring, bacteria-killing ingredient called methylglyoxal.

Are honeybees important?

Honeybees and the honey they make are a staple in the diets of a variety of animals.

For example, Winnie the Pooh’s honey obsession isn’t fictional – bears really do love honey. It’s energy-rich and calorie-dense, and the bees and larvae inside the nest are an excellent source of protein. Bears have varied diets, so honey is just one option on the menu – the same goes for honey badgers. Chimpanzees will likewise feed on bees and their honey, even using clubs and tree bark as tools to help them access their meal.

However, the role honeybees are most often celebrated for is pollination. They can visit up to 2,000 flowers each day as they gather nectar, spreading the pollen necessary for plants to reproduce.

But are honeybees always a good thing? To meet our massive global demand for honey, we’ve introduced domesticated honeybees all over the world. As well as the many hundreds of hives a single commercial producer can have, honeybees sometimes escape captivity and form feral populations in the wild. These non-native insects can be a problem for biodiversity in some places as they’re outcompeting native flower-visiting species for vital resources.

Insect declines, particularly of pollinators, are a concern, as the majority of Earth’s flowering plants need animals to pollinate them. However, conservationists point out that it’s important not to get domesticated honeybee declines and wild pollinator declines mixed up. While honeybees are certainly important pollinators, managed honeybees are effectively ‘livestock’ that are an agriculture problem, rather than a conservation concern.

The bees that we should be doing our best to help are our wild, native species.

This article includes information from the book Diary of a Honey Bee by Dennis Wells.