Honey bees are known for their social structures and honey production. While humans value honey, its primary purpose is to serve the bees themselves. This product is fundamental to a bee colony’s survival, supporting essential functions. Understanding how bees utilize honey reveals their cooperative behaviors and adaptations for survival.
Honey as the Colony’s Primary Fuel
Honey serves as the main carbohydrate source for the entire bee colony, providing energy for their daily activities. Adult worker bees consume honey to fuel flight muscles, enabling foraging for nectar and pollen, and performing tasks within the hive. This energy supply also supports thermoregulation, allowing bees to maintain a stable internal hive temperature.
Honey is also crucial for the development of young bees. Nurse bees, younger workers, consume honey and pollen to produce royal jelly, a protein-rich secretion fed to queen larvae. They also use honey to create bee bread, a fermented mixture of pollen and honey that provides nutrients for growing worker and drone larvae. Worker bees dilute honey with water before feeding it to larvae due to its high viscosity, ensuring nutrient absorption for their rapid growth.
Honey for Winter Survival
Honey acts as a food reserve for bee colonies, particularly when external food sources are scarce, such as winter. Bees store honey in hexagonal comb cells, creating a concentrated food supply that can last for months. Without adequate honey stores, a colony cannot endure colder months, making this reserve important for survival.
During winter, honey bees form a tight cluster to generate and conserve heat within the hive. Bees inside this cluster shiver their flight muscles, metabolizing stored honey to produce warmth. This collective effort allows the colony to maintain temperatures well above freezing, typically between 15°C and 30°C in the cluster, and around 33°C in the brood-rearing area. A colony may consume between 15 to 50 kilograms (approximately 33 to 110 pounds) of honey over winter to fuel this energy-intensive process.
Honey’s Role in Hive Construction
Honey plays an indirect role in the construction and maintenance of the hive’s physical structure. Worker bees produce beeswax, the material used to build the honeycomb. To secrete wax, worker bees must consume large quantities of honey, typically around 6 to 8 pounds of honey for every pound of wax produced.
Honey is metabolized by specialized fat cells associated with eight wax-producing glands on the underside of a worker bee’s abdomen. These glands secrete tiny, transparent wax flakes. Bees then scrape, chew, and mix these flakes with saliva to make the wax pliable. They mold this wax into hexagonal comb cells, which serve as storage units for honey and pollen, and provide chambers for raising the next generation of bees. The hive temperature must be maintained between 33°C and 36°C for efficient wax secretion and comb building.