Almost 2 million flowers are needed to make one pound of honey. Flowers and bees have a long history, ever since thousands of years ago. The color and scent of a flower attracts insects and bees.
Pollen is the yellow-powdery substance inside of flower blossoms. It contains the male reproductive parts. When bees land on a flower, the bee gets some pollen on their hairy bodies, and when they land on the next flower, some of the pollen from the first one rubs off, pollinating the plant.
The pollen of one flower will stick on the female cells of another. This is called fertilization, which benefits the plants. In the mutualistic relationship, the bees get to eat nectar from a flower, and the flowering plant gets to reproduce their offspring.
Drinking from 1,000 flowers may be enough to fill one bee’s stomach. But not the other stomach. Bees have two stomachs. One for digestion (like humans) and another to store nectar. A colony will travel to 50 million flowers a day. They work together as a team to communicate where the best flowers are located. One form of communication is the waggle dance, where they will bump into each other, make noises, and well, dance.
Making the perfect honey starts in 4 steps:
- Foraging- When foraging, bees extract nectar from their long tongue, or ‘crop’, and store it in their honey stomach. The honey in the stomach mixes with enzymes, transforming it into a chemical substance.
- Digesting- When a honeybee returns to the hive, it vomits the honey into another bee’s mouth, and that bee vomits into the next bee in line. Yes, that is right: vomit. This process is continued until the digested nectar is finally deposited into the honeycomb.
- Dehydrating – At this point, nectar is still a liquid, and not the thick honey we know. To get all of that extra water out, they fan it with their wings, speeding up the evaporation process.
- Storing-When most of the water evaporates, the bee seals the honey comb with a secretion liquid, and eventually it hardens into beeswax. The beeswax protects the honey from water and air, storing it for the long winter months.
Bee The Change 