All About Honey: How Is it Made?

Happy National Honey Month! 

Have you seen honey in your local grocery store? The farmer’s market? Your own kitchen at home? Have you ever tasted honey on toast or in tea? You may know that honeybees make it…but how?

When bees visit flowers, they drink a sweet syrup called nectar using their straw-like tongue called a proboscis and carry it back to their hive in their honey stomach. There, they exchange the nectar with other bees in the hive using their proboscis, which they insert into their honeycomb cells. The bees flap their wings at 11,700 times per minute to dry it out (dehydration), and then allow the nectar to mature into thick, sweet honey! Once it’s ready, they seal it up with wax to keep it fresh. Like adding a lid to their very own honey jar! 

Not all honey is the same. It can look and taste different depending on the flowers the bees visit. Orange blossom honey is light and fruity, while buckwheat honey is dark and bold. Some honey is runny, and some is thick like buttery fondant! There is a honey for everybody!

Want to try honey for yourself? Visit a farmers' market in your town with your family or friends and taste different kinds made by local honeybees. You can also try cooking with honey at home using the recipes from our blog, drizzle it on toast, stir it into yogurt, or sweeten tea with a spoonful.

Next time you enjoy honey, make sure to thank the busy bees who made it!

Have No Fear When Bees are Near

Bee stings are never fun, but they may happen! The good news? They're usually harmless and easy to treat, especially if you know what to do right away. Whether you got a little too close to a curious honeybee or stumbled into their flight path, here’s how to handle the sting and a little insight into how bee venom is actually used in healing. 

How to Remove a Bee Stinger

If you’ve been stung by a bee act fast:

1. Look for the stinger. It’ll look like a tiny black splinter.
2. Scrape, don’t pinch. Use the edge of a credit card or fingernail to gently scrape the stinger out. Avoid using tweezers — pinching can squeeze more venom in.
3. Clean the area with soap and water, and apply a cold compress to reduce swelling.

Wait, Bee Venom Can Be Healing?

The answer is yes, with Apitherapy! The use of bee products (like honey, propolis, royal jelly, and even venom) in natural healing. Bee venom therapy is actually used in some wellness circles to treat inflammation, arthritis, and even chronic pain. So yes, bee stings hurt — but knowing how to handle them quickly makes all the difference.

Photo Credit to Bee Culture

Honeybees Waggle Dance and Help Make Our Food

Did you know that honeybees can dance? But they don’t dance just for fun; they dance to share important information with the other bees in their hive. This special bee dance is called the waggle dance, and it helps honeybees communicate about the floral sources they find. When bees visit flowers, they also help plants grow through something called pollination.

When a honeybee finds a flower full of sweet nectar or pollen, she flies back to the hive to tell her sisters. Instead of talking, she dances! The waggle dance is a special kind of bee behavior where the bee wiggles her body while moving in a figure-eight shape. The direction, angle to the sun, and the intensity of her vibrations that she dances tell the other bees which way to fly, and the speed of her wiggle shows how far the flowers are. 

Why do bees need flowers, and why do flowers need bees? Flowers give bees nectar and pollen. Nectar is a sweet liquid syrup that bees drink and then turn into honey, and pollen is a yellow powdery substance that bees use for protein. When bees collect pollen, they also drop some of it from flower to flower, which helps the plant reproduce. This is called pollination. Pollination helps flowers grow seeds, and seeds grow into fruits and vegetables. Without bees, we wouldn’t have many of the foods we eat, like apples, blueberries, cucumbers, and pumpkins.

Their waggle dance helps the hive find the best flowers for the honeybee colony, and their visits to flowers help plants grow and make our food. So the next time you see a bee buzzing by, remember she might be dancing soon to tell her friends about the tasty flowers she found! Try planting bee-friendly flowers like lavender and sunflowers in your garden.

The Honey Hydrator

When the weather heats up, staying hydrated becomes non-negotiable, especially if you're spending time outside or sweating it out at the gym. You don’t need anything fancy to feel refreshed. This two-ingredient honey hydrator is light, natural, and gives you just enough of a boost when you need it most.

Honey Hydrator Recipe
    Ingredients:

• 12 oz cold water (bonus points if it’s filtered)

• 1 teaspoon honey

    Instructions:

1. Stir the honey into the water until fully dissolved.
2. Pour over ice or keep it chilled in your water bottle.
3. Sip + enjoy the subtle sweetness and light energy lift.

That’s it, fast hydration and a natural hit of energy when you're on the go. I love this before a workout, mid-hike, or even just running errands in the heat. A quick hydrator, with some natural antioxidants, and a sweet taste!

Beekeeping - An Adventure into the Hives!

Imagine you are a beekeeper, and you are checking your hive! The white wooden hive box is buzzing with bees around the entrance! After removing the lid, you see inside the box, where there are 10 wooden frames. On those frames, the bees are crawling around, seeing who the new visitor is! 

When you pull out a frame, you see the many bees walking across the beeswax with the hexagon-shaped cells. Did you know that honeybees have the instinct to make their comb into hexagons? It’s the best shape for the worker bees to store their honey and pollen in!

On the frame, you also see a bee bigger than the workers with a broader body, large eyes that almost take over their whole head, and doesn’t have a stinger. That is the male drone bee! You see a worker bee feeding the drone with her tongue, which is called a proboscis, since drones cannot feed themselves.

As you continue looking at the frames, you come across one that appears to have tiny rice-grain-like eggs inside the comb, and nearby, you see the queen bee laying them! She has a larger thorax and abdomen, and she lays 1000-2000 brood eggs every single day! She’s a very busy bee! 

All of the worker bees in the hive, the drone bees, and the queen work together inside the hive box, and it is so fascinating watching it happen. You look forward to seeing them again in one to two weeks, where they will have made more honey, collected more pollen, and have brand new adult worker bees!

~Princess Emilia

Spring Food for Honeybees

The spring season is quickly approaching, and with that we will soon hear the chirping of birds and the buzz of honeybees. With the weather warming, and sometimes being unpredictable, this is the perfect time to take up a new hobby of gardening while supporting our buzzing friends. 

If you are planning on supporting honeybee populations, while also taking in the beautiful sunshine, consider planting the list of plants below to ensure the honeybees have something to eat!

Some flowers that are perfect for spring bloom include: 

• Bachelors Buttons
  
• Snowdrops
• Common Yarrow
• Petunias
• Marigolds
• Bee Balm
• Cosmos

All of these plants provide beautiful colors for your garden while also providing a nectar and pollen source for honeybees! You can find seeds and bulbs at your local garden store.

Bee-ing Sick is No Fun!

 As March comes along, so do sneezes and coughs! The flu season has begun, so it’s very important to wash your hands and cough or sneeze into your elbow bend. Just like we get sick, so do honeybees!

Honeybees have many different sicknesses that they can get. They can get viruses and fungal infections. Viruses and fungi are very, very small and can’t be seen by the regular eye. You will need a microscope to see them. A microscope is a tool scientists use to see very small objects, making them look larger.

I am a scientist in my college, and I work on helping honeybees who are sick and making medical treatments for them. I am studying the fungus called Nosema ceranae, more commonly called Nosema. Nosema can cause honeybees to be unable to fly, and in colonies with this infection, you can also see brown droppings on the outside of the hive box.

Viruses are non-living, which makes them different from fungi. This means that they need a living organism to transport them. A living organism that commonly transports viruses in the hive is the Varroa destructor mite, also known as the Varroa mite. One virus that honeybees can get is called the Deformed Wing Virus. This virus makes honeybee wings look crumpled and deformed. This means that the bee is unable to fly.

Honeybees can’t wear masks to help prevent spreading sicknesses in such close living quarters in the hive. But honeybees also have ways to avoid getting sick, called hygienic behaviors! Before a honeybee enters the hive after collecting nectar and pollen, there will be a bee at the entrance who will clean off any “germs” from her that she may have been exposed to. Also, when baby bees called larvae are still growing inside the hive comb cells, if an adult bee smells that a larva is sick, she will remove it from the hive to prevent disease.

More good news is that there are fantastic treatments that scientists are creating to help honeybees. These treatments are then sold to beekeepers so they can treat their colonies with their sicknesses and to control the spread of pests, like the Varroa mite.

Don’t forget to wash your hands, and I hope to “bee” seeing you soon!

~ Princess Emilia