We all know that Honey Bees are always at work, trying to make warm delicious honey. But do you know how they make it? They collect sweet juice nectar from flowers and take it back to the hive, where the other bees change it into honey. Nectar is a clear liquid which is four parts water and one part sugar. They use their long tube like straw tongues to suck out nectar. Bees have two stomachs. The special one that is supposed to keep honey is a “honey stomach”. Honeybees visit between 100 to 1500 flowers in order to fill their honey-stomachs. Wow! That’s a lot of work.

After the collection of nectar honey bees return to their hives where the worker bees suck out the nectar from their honey stomachs. They chew the nectar for some time and then spread  it all over the honeycombs where the water evaporates from it, leaving a thicker syrup. When the honey is gooey enough the beehive is shut of with a wax plug. Bees are happy because their food is ready. In one year, a colony of bees eats around 150 pounds of honey. Whoa! That is so much. Wonder how much honey Winnie the Pooh bear eats in an year..

While honey bees go from one flower to another in search of nectar, they also make something more than honey and they don’t even know about it! Well here is what they do. There is something called pollen. Now pollen looks like dust and it grows on a flower. Sometimes when the pollen from one flower falls on another flower magic happens. A fruit begins to grow.

Fruits like apples, oranges, pears and peaches grow when a right pollen from the bees reaches the right flower. Imagine if the honeybees were not moving from one blossom to another, how would you get those healthy crunchy bites of apple? Hmm…