A Bee Legend: The Story of Honey, Step by Step

Engineers who build hexagonal comb cells, masters of taste who transform nectar from flowers into a magnificent food, winged miracles in nature - bees... They are the producers of honey, which we all love for its perfect appearance, unique natural taste, and nutritious content. The honey production process is an event that we should think about and know the details of at least once in our lives.

 

How is honey, a source of healing that accompanies our breakfasts and sweetens our drinks, produced by bees? How do bees work to produce this miracle? The answer to all of this is a secret of nature. By unraveling this secret step by step, we will also answer the question, "How is honey produced?"

 

A Factory and Unique Factory Workers

From the bees seen in wall paintings from the Polished Stone Age and the people consuming the honey collected by bees, we understand that this ancient delicacy has been in our lives for a very long time. In other words, honey's introduction to the human palate dates back a long time. Of course, the days when people climbed trees or rocks to use the honey in beehives as food are long gone. Now, we can instantly access this natural delicacy on supermarket shelves. So, let's take a look at what stages honey, our indispensable food, goes through before reaching our tables.

 

First Step: The Hive

We can think of the hive as a factory. Bees fill their honeycombs in the hives and then offer us this sweet delicacy. First, we want to touch upon how the honeycomb is made. The engineers of the honeycomb algorithm, still considered a mathematical marvel with its perfect hexagonal shape, are entirely bees. If we consider a honeycomb, we need to immediately move away from the idea that a single bee makes it, because it is a complete team effort. A large group of bees gathers and sets to work to produce these hexagonal compartments. You might think this crowded group of bees would create chaos, but the result is enormous. So much so that when the hexagons forming the honeycomb join in the middle, their joining points are never visible, and no deviation is seen in the angles of the hexagons. Even the wall thicknesses of these comb cells are the same and perfect. Bees build combs to store food, raise their larvae, or shelter themselves.

A Perfect Teamwork: Comb Making

The main building material for honeycombs is beeswax. Bees secrete beeswax from 4 pairs of wax glands located under their abdomens. They take the secreted beeswax from between the glands with the help of their legs. Bees are very crowded when building combs, as they interlock to provide enough heat for the beeswax. When sufficient heat is provided, the beeswax is secreted. With the beeswax they produce, they create thousands of hexagonal cells and combine these cells to form the combs. They also measure the width and thickness of the comb cells with their sensitive sensory hairs. For this reason, these shapes are completely perfect. Bees deposit their honey into these perfect combs.

 

A Team Effort: The Bee's Honey-Making Process

We know where bees store their food and how they make this place. The answer to "How do bees make honeycombs?" is one of the most fascinating parts of the story. But the miracles in honey making are not over yet. Let's go back to the very beginning. That is, to the first encounter between the bee and the flower.

Flowers are one of the most beautiful parts of the world with their visual richness. Flowers, which appeal to our eyes and attract us with their scents, also contribute greatly to the formation of honey thanks to their relationship with bees. This is because bees are interested in the nectar of flowers. They fill their sacs with the nectar they collect from flowers. They mix the nectar collected in these sacs with the enzymes they produce and return to the combs in their hives to ripen the mixture. Here, logistics come into play. The worker bee gives the honey it brought to the hive to a bee in the hive. Because its job is entirely to collect nectar and then, after mixing it with its enzymes, deposit it in the hive. As soon as it deposits the nectar in the hive, it immediately goes to collect more material. The brought material is taken by the bees doing internal hive service and transported to the combs. The transported materials are then waiting in the placed comb cell.

 

The Diligent Work Program of Worker Bees

Let's state that only female bees can produce honey. Male bees are only for reproduction and continuation of the species. So, all the honey we eat is created by the labor of female bees. We call the bees that mix the ingredients they get from flowers with their enzymes and store them in combs "worker bees."

A worker bee performs many different tasks throughout its life cycle, tirelessly collecting nectar and bringing it to the hive. It cleans itself and sets off for more nectar, never tiring. It dedicates its short life entirely to this. To produce 1 gram of honey, it visits flowers approximately 180,000 times. The amount of honey a bee collects in its lifetime is 1/12 of a teaspoon. From this information alone, we can understand what a great effort and labor product the honey that is lined up on supermarket shelves and easily accessible is. Moreover, honey-making bees are quite strong. They can fly carrying nectar much heavier than their own weight.

 

Final Stage: Honey Collection and Analysis

The work is now out of the bees' hands. The bees have produced the honey, but the processes for presenting it to humanity are not finished. In this process, of course, humans come into play.

 

• Beekeepers place beeswax foundation sheets into the hives they have built or purchased. After the process described above is completed, beekeepers, whose bees now deposit honey onto the foundation sheets, open their hives.
• After the combs are full, the bees ripen them by evaporating the water and cap them. The beekeeper removes the combs from the hive and scrapes off the capping. They are then placed in an extractor for preparation for analysis.

• The extracted honey is filled into containers and analyzed at the Balparmak Research and Quality Control Laboratory. These analyses are necessary to understand that the honey is 100% natural and to determine its quality. For this, tests are carried out on hundreds of parameters during the analysis phase.

• If the analysis results comply with quality standards, the honey is packaged and takes its place on supermarket shelves.

 

The story that begins with a bee landing on a flower; a miracle of nature, the labor of thousands of bees... Besides this, the journey of honey to our tables is the result of the bee's intelligence, talent, the beekeeper's sensitivity, and analyses performed in R&D centers guaranteeing the honey's naturalness and taste. This miracle, born from the collaboration of nature and humans, is a good thing to have in our lives.