Honey is a sweet, viscous food substance primarily made by bees from the sugary secretions of plants, known as nectar, or sometimes from insect secretions like honeydew. Many associate all bees with honey production, but only a small fraction of the over 20,000 bee species produce it in quantities significant for human consumption.
The Primary Honey Producers
The Apis genus, commonly known as honey bees, are the most prominent honey producers, with the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) being the most widely managed species. These bees exhibit eusociality, living in large colonies that can number in the tens of thousands. A colony typically consists of one queen responsible for reproduction, numerous non-reproductive female workers, and a smaller proportion of male drones. This complex social arrangement enables the division of labor essential for large-scale honey production.
Worker bees undertake various tasks throughout their lives, including foraging for nectar, processing it, building and maintaining the wax comb, and caring for the young. The honey-making process begins when foraging worker bees collect nectar, which is typically 70-80% water.
Inside the bee’s honey stomach, enzymes, such as invertase, are added to the nectar. These enzymes begin to break down the complex sugars in nectar, primarily sucrose, into simpler sugars like glucose and fructose. Upon returning to the hive, the foraging bees regurgitate the partially processed nectar and transfer it to other worker bees. These bees continue to process the nectar and then spread it in the hexagonal wax cells of the honeycomb.
To reduce the water content from 70-80% to 18%, worker bees rapidly fan their wings over the open cells. This dehydration process creates the thick, stable substance known as honey, which the bees then cap with wax for long-term storage. Honey serves as the colony’s primary food source, providing energy, especially during nectar scarcity or cold winter months when foraging is not possible. Other Apis species, such as the Asian honey bee (Apis cerana), also produce honey, though often in smaller quantities compared to Apis mellifera.
Beyond the Common Honey Bee
Stingless bees (tribe Meliponini) are another group that produces honey, found predominantly in tropical and subtropical regions. While their honey differs from that of honey bees, often having a more tangy or sour taste, a thinner consistency due to higher water content, and a distinct chemical composition, it is still a notable product.
Stingless bees store their honey in spherical pots constructed from cerumen, a mixture of wax and resin, rather than the hexagonal wax combs of Apis bees. The quantity of honey produced by a stingless bee colony is much smaller than that of a typical Apis mellifera hive, often less than one kilogram per year. Despite the lower yield, stingless bee honey is valued in local communities for its unique flavor and traditional medicinal properties. This practice of cultivating stingless bees for honey is known as meliponiculture.
Why Most Bees Don’t Make Honey
The vast majority of bee species do not produce honey for storage like honey bees. Many of these bees are solitary, meaning a single female bee constructs and provisions her nest without the aid of a large colony. Unlike social honey bees that need to sustain a large colony through periods of scarcity, solitary bees typically provision individual cells within their nests with enough food for their offspring to develop. Once an egg is laid on this food provision, the adult female often seals the cell and moves on, or her life cycle concludes.
These bees store pollen and nectar directly in their nest cells as “bee bread” to feed their developing larvae. This contrasts with honey, which is a concentrated, enzymatically altered, and dehydrated form of nectar designed for long-term preservation and communal consumption. The life cycles and social structures of most bee species do not necessitate large-scale food storage.
For example, solitary bees like carpenter bees and leafcutter bees create individual chambers stocked with a mixture of pollen and nectar for their young. Even social bees like bumblebees, while forming colonies, typically have annual life cycles where only the queen overwinters. Their colonies are much smaller than honey bee colonies, storing limited nectar and pollen for immediate consumption or shorter periods. This fundamental difference in life history and social organization explains why honey production is a specialized trait found in only a few bee lineages.