How Do Bees Make Honey?

Short answer

• Bees make honey in three main moves: they collect nectar from flowers, they change its sugars with enzymes while passing it from bee to bee, and they dry it out by fanning it with their wings until it is thick enough to keep. The finished honey is then sealed into wax cells in the honeycomb. Honey is therefore not nectar straight from a flower. It is nectar that has been processed, concentrated, and stored by a colony of honey bees. Skip the enzyme step and the sugars stay in the wrong form. Skip the drying step and the stored liquid would ferment. Skip the wax seal and the finished honey would pull moisture back out of the air and spoil. No single bee makes honey on her own. Foragers gather the raw material, younger house bees process it, and fanning bees finish the drying. The queen does not make honey, the drones do not make honey, and most bee species do not make honey at all. --- A jar of honey looks simple, but behind it sits one of the most organized food storage systems in nature. A honey bee colony has no pantry or refrigerator, yet it must feed thousands of bees through stretches when no flowers are blooming. Its answer is to turn a thin, watery, seasonal liquid into a dense, stable food that can sit in wax for months and still be good to eat. Every step in honey making is a solution to that storage problem.

Which Bees Make Honey, and Which Do Not

Most bee species do not make honey. The bees that build the large stored-honey supplies people harvest are honey bees, and in the United States the familiar honey bee is the western honey bee, Apis mellifera. Bumble bees store only small amounts of nectar in wax pots for short term use, and they do not build the large, long lasting honey stores that honey bee colonies build. Solitary bees do not make stored honey at all. Carpenter bees, for example, are covered in a separate Amberaisle article on whether wood boring bees sting: a female carpenter bee excavates a tunnel in wood and provisions each cell with pollen and nectar for one offspring, and she leaves no surplus store behind. This article does not repeat that article’s sting, identification, or tunnel content.

Honey bees are different because they are social and they overwinter as a colony. A colony that stays together through winter needs food it can draw on when foraging is impossible, and honey is that food. Bees do not make honey for people. They make it for themselves, and people harvest only the surplus a strong colony makes beyond what it needs. Honeybee workers live only weeks in summer but months in winter: how long bees live depends on the species and the caste, not on a single figure.

It is also worth saying plainly what honey is not. Honey is not bee vomit in the everyday sense of food that has been digested and thrown back up. The nectar a forager carries is held in a special storage organ, the crop, which North Carolina State University describes as used solely for storage, with the nectar not digested there as food for the bee. The bee does pass the nectar back up again, a move scientists call regurgitation, but it is a transfer between storage organs, not the return of a meal from a digestive stomach.

Meet the Colony: Who Does What

A honey bee colony has one queen, hundreds of drones in spring and summer, and thousands of female workers, according to the University of Wisconsin. The workers do all the heavy lifting here, and they change jobs as they age. Penn State University’s entomology department describes the pattern: as young adults, workers tend developing larvae; in middle age they take on duties such as guarding the hive, housekeeping, and building comb with wax; the oldest workers are the foragers who leave the colony to collect pollen and nectar.

The queen’s job is to lay eggs. Penn State notes that a healthy queen can lay over a thousand eggs per day, and that there is only one queen in a colony. She does not forage, fan nectar, or build comb. Drones are male bees whose primary function is to mate with queens, Penn State adds, and they do no work for the colony. So when this article says “bees make honey,” it really means “female worker bees make honey,” with foragers at one end of the chain and house bees at the other.

Step 1: Finding Flowers and Collecting Nectar

Everything starts with a flower. Plants produce nectar, a sugary liquid, to attract pollinators, and honey bees are among the pollinators that answer the call. A forager visits flowers and drinks nectar through her proboscis, the long, tube-like tongue that the University of Wisconsin compares to a straw. While she drinks, she also brushes against pollen, and as she moves from flower to flower she carries some of that pollen with her, helping flowers reproduce.

Nectar itself is mostly sugar and water. North Carolina State University describes it as consisting largely of sucrose, which is table sugar, and water, with water usually making up approximately 70 percent of nectar. The University of Arkansas Extension puts the water figure higher for many nectars, saying nectar is often more than 75 percent water. The exact figure varies with the plant and the weather, so it is better to think of nectar as a thin, watery syrup than to fix on one number. What matters is the gap between that starting point and the finish line: finished honey contains less than 18.6 percent water by the definition North Carolina State cites, and Arkansas Extension says bees lower the moisture content to around 18 percent.

A forager does not fill up at one flower. The University of Wisconsin, citing figures from the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, reports that it takes about two million flowers and more than 55,000 miles in flight to make a single pound of honey. Those are older figures, cited from a 2011 university magazine article, so they should be read as an illustration of scale rather than a current census. Kentucky State University Extension adds that returning bees tell other bees where flowers are by performing a waggle dance on the comb, so a colony can direct its effort toward the richest nectar sources available that day.

Step 2: The Honey Stomach, or Crop

Once a forager drinks nectar, it goes into her crop, also called the honey stomach. The University of Wisconsin describes it as a second stomach within the abdomen, reached through the bee’s tubular mouthparts. Washington State University adds a vivid scale: the bee can haul about one-third of her body weight in nectar in this compartment.

Calling it a “stomach” suggests digestion, but the crop is a storage and transport organ, separate from the bee’s true digestive stomach. North Carolina State is explicit that the crop is used solely for storage and that the bee does not digest the nectar at all while it is there. Enzymes do begin to act on the nectar’s sugars during carrying and handling, but that chemical treatment is not the same as the bee eating the nectar for herself. The load in the crop is cargo, held for the colony, and it arrives at the hive ready to be handed over in full.

Step 3: Passing It On and Adding Enzymes

When the forager returns, she hands her load over. North Carolina State describes the forager regurgitating the nectar directly into the crop of a processor bee at or near the entrance to the hive, while the forager heads back out for more. The University of Arkansas Extension describes a similar handoff: a returning forager divides her load among a number of younger house bees, and each of those bees works the nectar for several minutes, beginning to process it into honey.

This mouth-to-mouth transfer has a technical name, trophallaxis, and it does far more than move liquid from one bee to another. Each time the nectar is passed and worked, the receiving bee adds enzymes from her salivary glands. The most important of these enzymes is invertase, which North Carolina State names and which Arkansas Extension calls sucrase. The two names describe the same job: the enzyme breaks the bond in sucrose, a double sugar, and splits it into its two single sugar parts, glucose and fructose. The University of Wisconsin puts it in textbook terms: enzymes break down sucrose, a disaccharide, into glucose and fructose, monosaccharides.

North Carolina State notes that processor bees add invertase every time they regurgitate their nectar, and that it takes many loads of nectar to fill a single cell. No single pass finishes the job. It is repeated handling, each pass adding a little more enzyme and exposing a little more surface to the air, that turns raw nectar toward honey. Arkansas Extension adds that each bee divides the nectar into smaller droplets, so the same volume has more surface area and moisture can begin to evaporate, and the University of Wisconsin describes bees moving nectar around in their mouthparts before placement into the honeycomb, exposing it to air and evaporating some of the water.

Step 4: Ripening, Fanning, and Drying

The most time consuming part of honey making is drying. Nectar starts out mostly water, and honey must end up mostly sugar, because water is what lets microbes grow. North Carolina State states the point bluntly: once nectar has ripened into honey, it contains so little water that no microbes can grow in it, which keeps it from becoming contaminated by bacteria or fungi. Arkansas Extension makes the same point from the other side: reducing the moisture prevents naturally present yeast cells from becoming active and prevents the honey from fermenting in the comb.

Bees dry nectar in two linked ways. First, the mouth-to-mouth working described above spreads the nectar thin and exposes it to air. Second, once the nectar is deposited in the comb, worker bees fan it. The University of Wisconsin says worker bees further dehydrate the stored nectar by fanning their wings, gradually turning the nectar into honey. Arkansas Extension describes many bees working together, fanning their wings and drawing air currents across the surface of the honeycomb, so that air movement draws off further moisture and ripens the honey. It is many bees lined up, beating their wings in concert, pushing humid air out of the hive and pulling drier air in, until the stored liquid crosses the threshold from nectar to honey.

That threshold is a moisture figure, not a color or a taste: ripe honey sits at around 18 percent water, below the 18.6 percent ceiling North Carolina State cites. Arkansas Extension warns that in very humid climates bees may have trouble getting their honey to ripen effectively, because the air they are fanning with is already damp. Ripening also explains why honey keeps so well. Arkansas Extension notes that capped honey will keep virtually forever, attributing that keeping power to the low moisture level, a low pH, and a small amount of naturally present hydrogen peroxide.

Step 5: Beeswax, Comb, and Capping

Honey needs a container, and bees make their own. Worker bees build comb from beeswax, which they secrete themselves rather than collect from plants. Kentucky State University Extension states that each worker bee has eight tiny wax glands on her abdomen, which secrete bits of wax that the workers then mold into a sheet of interlocking hexagons. Washington State University describes the same process from the bee’s point of view: using a gland in her body, the bee produces small flakes of wax, which she moves with her jaws, or mandibles, and shapes into comb. Fresh wax is white, Kentucky notes, and it darkens over time as it absorbs pigments from stored pollen.

Hexagonal cells pack together with no wasted space and share walls with their neighbors, so the comb uses as little wax as possible while holding a large volume.

When the honey in a cell is ripe, the bees seal it. The University of Wisconsin says worker bees seal the honey-filled comb cells with wax secreted from the worker’s abdomen, and that the cover is intended to preserve honey as the bees’ food supply. North Carolina State calls this capping and stresses that the seal must be airtight: if the cap is not airtight, the honey will absorb moisture from the air, making it susceptible to bacterial or fungal growth. Arkansas Extension makes the same warning in practical terms: if the bees did not seal the ripe honey, it would reabsorb humidity from the air, defeating all their work. Once capped, honey waits. Kentucky Extension notes that stored honey and pollen last many months inside the cells without spoiling, so the bees can eat this stored food when flowers are not available, in rainy periods and in winter.

From Hive to Jar, and Why Honeys Differ

Beekeepers harvest after the bees have finished, not instead of them. Arkansas Extension describes the harvest in simple terms: when beekeepers see that the colonies have ripened and capped all of the honey, it is time to harvest. Using a special knife, the beekeeper carefully slices away the cell cappings, and the honey is typically extracted by centrifugal force. The wax cappings are very clean, Arkansas adds, and they are the ideal beeswax for use in making cosmetics, lip balms, and soaps. Honey taken from uncapped cells is often unripe, with too much water, and it is liable to ferment after extraction, which is why experienced beekeepers leave uncapped frames in the hive for the bees to finish. Good beekeepers also take only the surplus, leaving the colony enough honey for winter.

If honey were just sugar and water, every jar would taste the same. It does not, because nectar carries more than sugar and water. Different flowers produce nectar with different mixes of sugars, acids, minerals, and aromatic compounds, and those differences survive processing and show up in the finished honey. The University of Wisconsin notes that a variety of flowers and climates lead to an array of different flavors and colors of honey, and that in the United States there are more than 300 types of honey, ranging from standbys such as clover, alfalfa, and orange blossom to regional specialties such as fireweed, tupelo, and macadamia nut. Honey made mostly from one kind of flower is called monofloral, or single variety honey, while honey made from many kinds of flowers is called polyfloral, or wildflower honey.

After all that processing, what is actually in the jar? Mostly glucose and fructose, plus water at less than about 18.6 percent, plus small amounts of other sugars, traces of enzymes, and micronutrients. Arkansas Extension notes that the ratio of these sugars varies with each batch of honey, based on the flowers that each hive of bees has been visiting. Two consequences follow. First, honey is a concentrated energy food, mostly sugar, so it should be treated like any other sweetener: enjoyable in moderation, not a health food by virtue of being natural. Second, honey’s small non-sugar fraction matters out of proportion to its size: the traces of enzymes, the acidity, and the low water content are what make honey keep and give different honeys their distinct aromas. Pollen, by contrast, is the protein rich food bees collect alongside nectar and store separately, often with a little honey added to preserve it, as Kentucky Extension describes. A jar of honey may contain traces of pollen from extraction, but honey itself is made from nectar, not from pollen.

Why Honey Crystallizes, and What to Do About It

A clear jar of honey often turns cloudy, grainy, and eventually solid. Many people throw such honey away, thinking it has gone bad. It has not. Crystallization is a natural property of a supersaturated sugar solution, which is what honey is: it holds more sugar dissolved in its water than water alone could normally hold, and given time, some of that sugar comes out of solution as crystals. Arkansas Extension states the outcome plainly: all honey will eventually crystallize, but this does not mean it is ruined, and it can be gently warmed in a water bath to melt the crystals and return it to a liquid state.

Some honeys crystallize faster than others, and the reason is their sugar mix. North Carolina State explains that nectars with higher levels of glucose tend to crystallize more readily, while sourwood and tupelo honeys, which have lower levels of glucose, almost never crystallize. Arkansas Extension adds that honey with a higher fructose to glucose ratio tends to crystallize at a slower rate than honey with higher glucose content, and that pollen grains in the honey will also speed up crystallization, because the grains give crystals a place to start forming. A fast crystallizing honey is not low quality, and a honey that stays liquid for years is not necessarily better.

If a jar does crystallize, the fix is gentle heat. North Carolina State advises putting the jar into a pot filled with hot, not boiling, water, and warns that overheating the honey can make it taste unpleasant. Once reliquefied, the honey is as good as before.

Myths, Safety, and Why Bees Bother

Several myths distort a real step in the process. The first is that bees make honey by vomiting up flower juice. As explained above, nectar is carried in a storage crop and transferred between bees, not digested as a meal and returned. The second myth is that honey is just nectar stored in a comb. Stored nectar would be thin, watery, and liable to ferment. Honey is nectar after enzyme treatment and drying. A third mistake is to think that bees make honey all year. Honey production follows the flowering season. In winter, when few or no flowers bloom, the colony lives on its stores and makes no new honey.

A more serious mistake concerns safety. Because honey keeps so well, people sometimes assume it is safe for everyone, including very young babies. It is not. North Carolina State, citing public health guidance, warns that children under the age of one should not eat honey because the honey can still contain botulinum spores. The spores cannot germinate inside the honey itself, because it is too dry, but they may become viable after the honey has been consumed, and an infant’s immune system may not be capable of warding them off. The rule is simple for the first year: no honey for babies under 12 months, in any form, including honey on a pacifier or mixed into food. After the first birthday, that specific risk no longer applies in the same way, but honey is still a sugary food and should be used in moderation.

Why did this elaborate system evolve? The answer is winter, and more generally, scarcity. A solitary bee can simply die in autumn after laying eggs that will emerge next spring. A honey bee colony, by contrast, keeps adults alive through winter, and those adults need fuel. Honey is the fuel that bridges the gap between one flowering season and the next: dense, so a small volume holds a lot of energy, and stable, so it can sit for months without spoiling. Every step that looks fussy, the repeated enzyme passes, the hours of fanning, the airtight capping, is a safeguard against a specific way the store could fail.

Conclusion

Bees make honey by turning flower nectar into a different substance, not by storing it unchanged. Forager bees collect nectar in their crops and bring it home. House bees receive it, add the enzyme invertase, and work it mouth to mouth until its sucrose becomes glucose and fructose. Fanning bees drive off water until the moisture falls to around 18 percent. Worker bees build the wax comb that holds it and seal each ripe cell with an airtight wax cap. The result is a dense, stable, long keeping food that carries the colony through winter, and that, when a strong colony makes a surplus, people can harvest and enjoy.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do bees make honey in simple terms? Forager bees collect nectar from flowers and carry it home in a storage pouch called the crop. House bees pass the nectar from bee to bee, adding enzymes that split sucrose into glucose and fructose. Other bees fan the nectar to evaporate most of its water. When the moisture drops to around 18 percent, the bees seal the cell with wax. That sealed, dried, enzyme treated nectar is honey.

Do bees make honey from nectar or from pollen? From nectar. Nectar provides the sugars that become honey. Pollen is a separate, protein rich food, stored in different cells to feed larvae and adults. A jar of honey may contain traces of pollen from extraction, but honey itself is processed nectar, not pollen.

Do all bees make honey? No. Honey bees make the stored honey that people harvest. Most other bee species do not. Bumble bees store only small, short term nectar supplies, and solitary bees such as carpenter bees do not build honey stores at all.

Why do bees make honey? To feed the colony when flowers are not blooming, especially in winter. Honey keeps for months in sealed wax cells, so a colony can draw on summer nectar long after the flowers have gone. Bees do not make it for people. People harvest the surplus from strong colonies.

How long does it take bees to make honey? There is no single fixed time, because ripening depends on the nectar flow, the humidity, and the strength of the colony. Beekeepers judge readiness by capping: bees only cap a cell once the honey inside has been dried to a moisture level that will keep, so a fully capped frame is the colony’s own sign that the honey is ready.

Is honey bee vomit? Not in the usual sense. Nectar is carried in the crop, a storage organ separate from the digestive stomach, and transferred mouth to mouth between bees rather than digested and thrown back up as a meal. Scientists call that transfer regurgitation, but it is a controlled handoff between storage organs.

Why does honey crystallize? Is crystallized honey bad? Crystallization is natural and harmless. Honey holds more sugar dissolved in its water than water could normally hold, and over time some sugar forms crystals, especially in honeys high in glucose. Crystallized honey is not spoiled. Warm the jar gently in hot, not boiling, water to melt the crystals. Do not overheat it, or the flavor will suffer.

Why do different honeys taste different? Because different flowers make different nectar. The mix of sugars, acids, minerals, and aromatic compounds varies by plant, and those differences survive processing and show up in the finished honey. That is why the United States has more than 300 types of honey, from mild clover to regional specialties such as tupelo and fireweed.

Can babies eat honey? No honey for children under 12 months, in any form. Honey can contain botulinum spores that cannot germinate in dry honey but may become viable after a baby swallows them, and an infant’s system may not be able to ward them off. After the first birthday, that specific risk no longer applies in the same way, but honey is still a sugary food and should be used in moderation.

Is honey vegan?

How do beekeepers get honey out of the hive? After the bees have ripened and capped the honey, the beekeeper slices off the wax cappings with a special knife and spins the frames so centrifugal force throws the honey out of the cells. Good beekeepers take only the surplus, leaving the colony enough honey for winter.

Keep reading: What Is Artificial Selection?

Sources & references

• University of Wisconsin-Madison, GROW magazine, "How bees make honey," (colony of one queen, hundreds of drones, thousands of workers; tubular mouthparts and honey stomach; enzymes break sucrose into glucose and fructose; nectar moved in mouthparts to evaporate water; fanning dehydrates stored nectar; cells sealed with wax from the worker's abdomen; about two million flowers and more than 55,000 miles of flight per pound of honey, and some 410 million pounds consumed per year in America, both cited to the USDA Economic Research Service; more than 300 types of honey in the United States, including clover, alfalfa, orange blossom, fireweed, tupelo, and macadamia nut)
• North Carolina State University, NC State News, "How Do Bees Make Honey? (It is Not Just Bee Barf)," (forager and processor bees; crop used solely for storage with no digestion of nectar there; invertase added at each regurgitation; nectar largely sucrose and water, about 70 percent water; honey defined as less than 18.6 percent water; fanning creates airflow and evaporates water; ripe honey too dry for microbes to grow; airtight wax capping, with moisture absorption if the cap fails; higher glucose nectars crystallize more readily, sourwood and tupelo almost never; crystallized honey reliquefied in hot, not boiling, water; children under one should not eat honey because of botulinum spores)
• University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture, Cooperative Extension Service, "Work it, Girl!," (nectar often more than 75 percent water, lowered to around 18 percent; lower moisture prevents yeasts from becoming active and honey from fermenting; forager divides load among younger house bees; each bee works nectar for several minutes and adds sucrase from salivary glands; sucrose split into glucose and fructose, the main sugars in honey; sugar ratio varies by flowers visited; higher fructose to glucose ratio crystallizes more slowly; pollen grains speed crystallization; all honey will eventually crystallize and gentle warming in a water bath returns it to liquid; fanning draws off further moisture, ripe below 18.6 percent; cells covered with brand new clean wax; unsealed honey would reabsorb humidity; capped honey keeps virtually forever, with low moisture, low pH, and a small amount of hydrogen peroxide; harvest by slicing cappings and centrifugal extraction, with cappings ideal for cosmetics, lip balms, and soaps)
• Washington State University, Ask Dr. Universe, "How do bees make honey?," (honey stomach carries about one-third of a bee's body weight in nectar; housekeeping bees receive regurgitated nectar and pass it on; fanning evaporates water; wax flakes produced from a gland and shaped with mandibles; wax cap seals the cell; pollen moved flower to flower helps flowers reproduce and is food for the bee; flavor depends on the plant nectar used)
• Pennsylvania State University, Frost Entomological Museum, Department of Entomology, "Honey Bees," (young workers tend larvae, middle aged workers guard, keep house, and build comb with wax, oldest workers forage for pollen and nectar; all workers are daughters of the queen and never reproduce; drones do no work and their primary function is mating; one queen per colony, mother of all bees, lays over a thousand eggs per day)
• Kentucky State University Cooperative Extension Program, "How Honeybees Make Beeswax Comb," (eight tiny wax glands on each worker's abdomen; wax molded into interlocking hexagons; fresh wax white, darkening as it absorbs pigments from stored pollen; comb used for walking, egg laying, and food storage; stored honey and pollen last many months, feeding bees in rainy periods and winter; returning bees communicate flower locations by a waggle dance on the comb)