You drink it in your tea and spread it on your bread, but what is honey, really?
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00:00 What is honey?
00:04 You drink it in your tea and spread it on your bread, but what is honey, really?
00:09 The sweet stuff is made from the nectar of flowering plants and stockpiled inside beehives
00:15 to eat during times of scarcity.
00:17 But how do industrious bees make this thick, golden liquid?
00:22 It starts when honeybees extract nectar, a sugary liquid, from flowers using their long,
00:27 tooth-shaped tongues.
00:29 This nectar is then stored in the bee's extra stomach, or crop.
00:33 As it's sloshing around in there, the nectar mixes with enzymes that transform its chemical
00:39 composition and pH, making it more suitable for long-term storage.
00:44 When the bee returns to the hive, it passes the nectar to another bee by, well, regurgitating
00:49 it into that bee's mouth.
00:51 So in one sense, honey is, in part, bee vomit.
00:55 The bees repeat this process until the nectar is deposited into a honeycomb for safekeeping.
01:01 But at this point, the nectar is still a viscous liquid, nothing like the thick, sugary syrup
01:06 you use at home.
01:08 To get all that excess water out of the honey, the bees get to work again, fanning the honey
01:13 with their wings to speed up the evaporation process.
01:17 Once most of the water is gone, the bees seal the honey up in the honeycomb using a liquid
01:22 from their abdomen that eventually hardens into beeswax.
01:26 The beeswax protects the honey from air and water, so it can be stored safely throughout
01:30 the cold, scarce winter months.
01:33 How bees make honey, just another one of life's little mysteries.
01:37 [Scratching]