What Exactly is Honey?

What Exactly is Honey?

When you think about bees, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?  That’s right, honey.  That golden, sweet, delicious liquid.  Although you might be familiar with honey, have you ever wondered, what exactly is honey?  Well, if you have, wonder no more.  Read on to learn what honey is.

Basically, honey is food.  It’s more complex than that, but that’s the basic idea.  Honey, a natural product, is food that bees produce so they can feed other bees and so they can have food during the winter.

Honey is sort of like the bee equivalent of putting up preserves.  Bees gather nectar during warmer months when flowers bloom and they process it into honey that can be stored for the winter.

Honey starts out as nectar from flowers.  Nectar is a sugary liquid produced by flowers to attract pollinators.  The bees process this nectar in a process called inversion and then evaporate the water from it until it becomes what we know as honey.  In the process of inversion, the bees turn the complex sugars that are in nectar into simpler sugars that are in honey.  If bees didn’t convert the nectar into honey, they wouldn’t be able to store it, because the nectar would spoil.

Honey is mostly sugar, and it’s about ⅙ water.  It also has enzymes, antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals.

One important idea to understand is that although honey is a natural product, it is a product.  It is something that bees produce.  It isn’t just something that comes from plants or that in some way just naturally occurs.  Bees make honey.  The bees in a hive can produce a lot more honey than they need, and this is the honey that people harvest.

Although you might think of honey as one kind of thing, there are actually hundreds of varieties.  The different honeys vary by the nectar that the bees collect to make it.  The different honeys can vary in how they taste, smell, and look.  The kind of honey that you might be most familiar with is clover honey.  This is honey made from nectar that comes from clover flowers.

Although different kinds of bees make honey, the honey that people eat is made by seven honeybee species.

Honey is a wonderful substance.  It tastes great and it’s actually something an insect produces.  That’s really sweet (pun intended).

By the way, if you like bees, take a few moments and read our post Beehave: Creating a Haven for Bees, for tips on how you can create an inviting place for them in your landscape.  Although the bees you might attract might not be honey bees, all bees are wonderful and important creatures.