Bees need a vital ingredient for their honey: nectar. The busy bees collect this ingredient from flowers and store it in their honey bladder. Back in the beehive, the bee chokes out the sap again and enriches it with substances from its body. Then a new bee soaks up the liquid and repeats the process. It might seem a bit gross to us, but that’s the secret of why honey is so healthy and why you can even make cough syrup out of it. In addition, the sap loses water and becomes firm. Only then is the honey ready.
But there is another ingredient that bees use in their honey: honeydew . This is a liquid that is created when aphids eat leaves and needles and excrete them again. It happens that the bees only collect nectar, then beekeepers speak of blossom honey. But if the bees collect nectar and honeydew, the result is called forest honey. So much work goes into a jar of honey.
Did you know that bees have to fly to around three million flowers for a jar of honey ? In doing so, they cover a distance that goes around our earth three times. In addition to the nectar, the bees also collect pollen. When you visit different flowers, something of it will always stick. The bees fertilize the plants and our fruit grows. To keep the bees safe , we have five simple ideas you can use to protect the bees.
What do beekeepers do?
The bees store the finished sap in their honeycombs and protect it with a thin layer of wax. Beekeepers remove these and place the individual honeycombs in a honey extractor. You can think of this extractor as a giant washing machine. Instead of water, this device ejects the honey from the individual chambers. The viscous liquid then runs through a sieve and is collected in a bucket. Then beekeepers fill the sweet delicacy into individual glasses.
Don’t the bees need honey themselves?
The bees actually do not make honeybees for us humans, but for themselves and their children. When there are no more flowers in winter, they still have something to eat. So that the bees do not lack anything, beekeepers do not take all the honey. In addition, the hard-working animals get sugar water as a substitute. Since the sweet water is more liquid, the bees can digest it more easily.
Also read: how often should you change your oil
