Save money and earn rewards when you shop online. We’ll pop up honey peach do the work for you. With one click, Honey will automatically look for and apply digital coupons and promo codes it finds to your cart. We’ll help you score the lowest price at some of your favorite brands.

Automatically find and apply discounts when you shop online! Save money and earn rewards when you shop online. We’ll pop up and do the work for you. With one click, Honey will automatically look for and apply digital coupons and promo codes to your cart. We’ll help you score some of the lowest prices on popular brands. Honeybees convert flower nectar into honey and store it in honeycombs within the hive to provide nutrition through the winter. Debbie Hadley is a science educator with 25 years of experience who has written on science topics for over a decade.

Bees create honey as a highly efficient food source to sustain themselves year-round, including the dormant months of winter—human beings are just along for the ride. In the commercial honey-gathering industry, the excess honey in the hive is what is harvested for packaging and sale, with enough honey left in the hive to sustain the bee population until it becomes active again the following spring. In the production of honey, these worker bees take on specialized roles as foragers and house bees. The actual process of transforming the flower nectar into honey requires teamwork. First, older forager worker bees fly out from the hive in search of nectar-rich flowers. Using its straw-like proboscis, a forager bee drinks the liquid nectar from a flower and stores it in a special organ called the honey stomach. At the moment the nectars reach the honey stomach, enzymes begin to break down the complex sugars of the nectar into simpler sugars that are less prone to crystallization.

With a full belly, the forager bee heads back to the hive and regurgitates the already modified nectar directly to a younger house bee. The house bee ingests the sugary offering from the forager bee, and its own enzymes further break down the sugars. Within the hive, house bees pass the nectar from individual to individual until the water content is reduced to about 20 percent. As the water evaporates, the sugars thicken into a substance recognizable as honey. When an individual cell is full of honey, the house bee caps the beeswax cell, sealing the honey into the honeycomb for later consumption. The beeswax is produced by glands on the bee’s abdomen. While most foraging bees are dedicated to collecting nectar for the production of honey, about 15 to 30 percent of the foragers are collecting pollen on their flights out from the hive.

The pollen is used to make beebread, the bees’ main source of dietary protein. The pollen also provides bees with fats, vitamins, and minerals. 12th of a teaspoon of honey. But working cooperatively, a hive’s thousands of worker bees can produce more than 200 pounds of honey for the colony within a year. A tablespoon of honey contains 60 calories, 16 grams of sugar, and 17 grams of carbs. For humans, it’s a “less bad” sweetener than refined sugar, because honey contains antioxidants and enzymes.

Honey can vary in color, flavor, and antioxidant level, depending on where it is produced because it can be made from so many different trees and flowers. Honey produced and sold locally is often much more unique in taste than honey manufactured on a huge scale and appearing on grocery store shelves, because these widely distributed products are highly refined and pasteurized, and they may be blends of honey from many different regions. Honey can be purchased in several different forms. It is available as a traditional viscous liquid in glass or plastic bottles, or it can be purchased as slabs of honeycomb with honey still packed in the cells. You can also buy honey in granulated form or whipped or creamed to make it easier to spread. All honey consumed by people is produced by only seven different species of honeybees.

Other types of bees, and a few other insects, also make honey, but these types are not used for commercial production and human consumption. Honey is not possible at all without nectar from flowering plants. Nectar is a sweet, liquidy substance produced by glands within plant flowers. Nectar is an evolutionary adaptation that attracts insects to the flowers by offering them nutrition. In return, the insects help fertilize the flowers by transmitting pollen particles clinging to their bodies from flower to flower during their foraging activities.