by Jim Mize

• Introduction
• Female Dominance
• Doing the Bee Boogie
• Makin' Honey but Not Biscuits
• Steer Clear of Swarms
• Download this article as a

Makin’ Honey but Not Biscuits

“Busy as a bee” is a phrase well justified, as the typical worker will visit and pollinate 10,000 flowers in a single day. Literally, they live on fast food.

All this activity targets one activity: making honey. Honey-making is a complex process, at least to me.

From what I can tell, it begins when a bee absorbs nectar into a honey sac, which works something like a stomach. On the trip back to the hive, some of the nectar is eliminated, and you can probably guess how.

The nectar is then enriched by the bee glands and unloaded back at the hive, and once again, I’ll let you envision this part of the process. Other bees do something disgusting to process it, and then flap frantically to evaporate more water. This distilling goes on for a while and when the water content drops to 17-20 percent, the revenuers show up. Just kidding, but the honey is “ripe” at that point.

Bees produce honey with the hope of getting to eat it all winter. This is especially true of the drones, who run the risk of getting the boot.

The typical bee colony consists of 50,000-60,000 workers and who knows how many slackers. They produce on average 50 pounds of honey and no biscuits.
Another reason they need all this honey is that they do not hibernate. Instead, they pass the winter eating and huddling to keep warm, probably around tiny potbelly stoves.