Interesting to know - how bees make honey
A unique natural product created by bees is called honey. How do bees make honey, why is there lime, buckwheat, meadow honey? How does a beekeeper teach to choose a single species of plants from herbs and wear only its pollen? How is a viscous mass with healing properties obtained from micronized pollen balls? Let's try to reveal the secret of getting honey.
Their common home is a hive
A worker bee starts to work from the moment of birth:
- 3 days are engaged in cleaning the combs, cleaning them after leaving;
- 4-6 days the larvae are fed with honey and pollen, they fly around the hive;
- 7-11 days, the bees appear in the glands of queen's milk, they feed the queen and queen larvae, which develop in several cells of the honeycomb;
- 12-17 days, wax glands appear, and the bees turn into builders of honeycombs, at the same time guard the hive, take nectar and maintain a microclimate;
- from the 18th day until the end of life, during honey harvesting, the bee flies out of the hive for raw materials for honey, bee feed.
Community of bees in hive obeys the laws of a single organism. To survive, the family needs food. Bees carry pollen from flowering plants, process it into honey, and store it in wax combs. Scientists have investigated how bees make honey from pollen and nectar.
In its flight, the bee is guided by the time, smell, and color of the hive. She flies to the flowers at the time of their opening. If, in the absence of the worker, the hive was repainted, she looks for it by smell, but uncertainly. Therefore, in the apiary, the hives are painted in different colors.
Honey making technology
Before you start collecting honey, you need to get containers for storing the product. In a beehive or wild side, a wax hexagonal honeycomb is always created, a perfect design that allows maximum use of volume. Bees build them. Moreover, honeycombs are not all the same, they are subdivided:
- queen cells, where the queens are fed;
- transitional, larvae grow there;
- drone - rebuilt by worker bees and queens;
- bees - a place where honey is stored.
Why honey bees is understandable. It is necessary to feed the brood and everyone who works to prolong the life of the family needs to stock up on the product for the winter.
So, the scout bee found a flowering meadow and flew to the hive, gathering a team for honey collection. The worker bee collects pollen and nectar. Bees begin to make honey as soon as pollen and nectar fall into a special crop. Enzymes that break down sugar are also served there.
Simultaneously with the nectar, the bee collects pollen with its shaggy legs, pollinating the plant. The pollen ball is hidden in a basket on the leg, from which a perga will be prepared. In the food warehouse, bee bread is stored separately from honey.
In order to fill the goiter, the bee needs to collect a tribute from one and a half thousand flowers. Having loaded 70 mg into the goiter, the bee flies low, covering the distance to the hive. If the hive is in the middle of the honey plants, fly no more than 2 km, the contents of the goiter are delivered to the hive.If further - part of the product is absorbed by the bee to replenish energy. Therefore, apiaries are mobile, they move to places where there are many flowers.
The worker bees take care of the queen, feed her and comb her hair. For some unknown reason, they can strangle the uterus in their arms, taking it into a tight, contracting ball. Sometimes the beekeeper discovers a sting in the corpse, the uterus was killed by her servants, workers, children.
If you are wondering how bees make honey, watch the video:
The bee transfers honey to the hive and flies away for a new bribe. At the same time, a worker from the hive takes a drop of the brought product several times, draws it into the goiter and releases it, she adds invertase from her goiter, continuing to ferment the nectar. Next, the product is dried to remove excess moisture. It is laid out in a thin layer along the bottom and walls of the cells and the moisture is allowed to evaporate. The hum of bees in front of the hive and inside it is the work of the wings, the ventilation of the hive. The honey dried to a moisture content of 21% is put into the upper honeycomb and sealed with a wax lid. From the moment the bribe enters the hive until the honey ripens, 10 days pass.
How much honey a bee collects depends on many factors. Bees do not fly in bad weather. If the apiary is far away, the bee can make only one entrance and spend a quarter of the bribe on itself. A healthy family collects up to 150 kg of honey over the summer, half of which is spent on supporting the life of the family. How hard it is for workers to get a sweet product, dry figures say. One collecting bee makes 400 sorties per life, swoops about 800 km. For 1 g of honey, you need to make 75 flights. One bee for life can bring 5 g of honey, a spoon. A kilogram of honey is collected by the joint efforts of 200 bees. A family can have up to 50,000 individuals. The end result depends on the weather conditions, the availability of honey plants and the health of the family.
The worker bee has a much larger brain than the queen and the drone.
Tricks of the beekeepers
There are up to 20 varieties of honey on the shelves, even from pine resin, which is not very clear. Gum - resin and the bee, tying the proboscis, will die. How do bees collect honey only from fireweed when there are herbs around? Since ancient times, insects have been taught to collect only linden or buckwheat honey, feeding this product to worker bees before flying to work. Fed bees pollinate the desired field ten times more efficiently, selectively collect the healing product.