Eat Your Bee Barf, It's Good For You

First of all, honey is not bee poop. I can’t believe I even have to say that, but you would not believe how many people have said to me, “Honey is bee poop, right?” Let’s assume these are the same people who ask, “Are these oranges local?” at the farm stand in the summer. We will move on and pretend we didn’t hear them.Actually, honey is more like bee vomit, but that’s not a very appetizing image, is it? Allow me to explain.

Honey is the lifeblood of the beehive. It nourishes bees at every stage of their lives, and sustains them through the long winter months when nothing is blooming and they’re packed in a tight, grumpy cluster trying to stay warm. Honey is also the basis of the relationship between people and bees, which has gone on for millennia.

Cave paintings depict humans harvesting honey from wild bees 15,000 years ago, and beekeeping arose in North Africa 9,000 years ago. Early hives across Europe and Asia were made from hollow logs, wooden boxes, woven baskets and clay pots.

Archaeologists opening King Tut’s tomb in 1923 found—in addition to the more glamorous solid gold coffin and other Egyptian bling—sealed stone jars full of honey. Not rotten, moldy honey, but perfectly fine, put-it-on-your-toast-right-now, 2,000-year-old honey. Honey doesn’t spoil. It’s also antiseptic, so if you’re ever in a pinch where you need to keep a wound clean and don’t have any Neosporin handy, you can use honey. Might be messy, but you probably won’t get an infection.

Fortunately for us—and due in part to selective breeding—a healthy hive generally produces more honey than it needs. Responsible beekeepers harvest only as much as the bees can spare. Many commercial beekeepers take nearly all the bees’ honey, replacing it with sugar water. Not nearly as nutritionally rich as honey, sugar water as a dietary staple for bees is one of the probable causes of the decline of honeybees.

But back to making honey. When the weather is nice and flowers are blooming, thousands of worker bees pour out of the hive every morning to forage for nectar. These are not novice bees. Foraging is left to the eldest workers, those 3 weeks old and up. These brave girls will fly a grand total of 500 miles before they keel over from exhaustion, all in a quest to bring as much nectar and pollen back to the hive as possible.

If you watch a honeybee on a flower, you’ll see her extend her long, tube-like tongue, or proboscis, into the center of the flower. She sucks the nectar into a sort of storage stomach, called a crop, where it mixes with enzymes that act as a preservative.

You may have noticed that honey comes in a wide range of colors and subtly different flavors. The bees’ foraging options determine the final product. Most of our local honey is wildflower honey, drawn from a variety of blooming plants. When hives are sited in fields of one type of flowering plant—orange groves or clover, for example—you’ll get honey with a flavor of that plant. Some beekeepers in France were surprised in 2014 to find their bees making blue and green honey, until they learned that the bees were feeding on colorful candy waste discarded by a nearby M&M plant.

After visiting as many as 600 flowers on a single trip, our bee heads home. Just inside the hive, she’s met by a house bee whose job it is to transport nectar from the foragers to the combs. The forager regurgitates the nectar into the mouth of the house bee and heads back out to find more flowers. Over the course of her three weeks of foraging, she will gather enough nectar to make 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.

The first house bee passes the nectar on to another, a process that may repeat several times before the nectar is deposited into a honeycomb cell. Once in the cell, other house bees are charged with fanning the honeycombs with their wings. That fanning helps to evaporate water out of the honey. As the water is evaporated out, the volume of honey in the cell decreases. Other workers move honey to and from the cells until each cell is filled with honey at just the right moisture content—15 to 18 percent. This curing process can take from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on the nectar source. Once the perfect balance is achieved, other workers cap the comb with a secretion from their abdomen that eventually hardens into beeswax. Sealed like that, away from air and water, honey can be stored indefinitely. Just ask King Tut.