You drink it in your tea and spread it on your bread, but what is honey, really?
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00:01What is honey?
00:04You drink it in your tea and spread it on your bread, but what is honey, really?
00:09The sweet stuff is made from the nectar of flowering plants and stockpiled inside beehives to eat during times of scarcity.
00:17But how do industrious bees make this thick, golden liquid?
00:22It starts when honeybees extract nectar, a sugary liquid, from flowers using their long, tube-shaped tongues.
00:29This nectar is then stored in the bee's extra stomach or crop.
00:33As it's sloshing around in there, the nectar mixes with enzymes that transform its chemical composition and pH,
00:40making it more suitable for long-term storage.
00:43When the bee returns to the hive, it passes the nectar to another bee by, well, regurgitating it into that bee's mouth.
00:50So in one sense, honey is in part bee vomit.
00:54The bees repeat this process until the nectar is deposited into a honeycomb for safekeeping.
01:01But at this point, the nectar is still a vicious liquid, nothing like the thick, sugary syrup you use at home.
01:07To get all that excess water out of the honey, the bees get to work again, fanning the honey with their wings to speed up the evaporation process.
01:16Once most of the water is gone, the bees seal the honey up in the honeycomb using a liquid from their abdomen that eventually hardens into beeswax.
01:26The beeswax protects the honey from air and water, so it can be stored safely throughout the cold, scarce winter months.
01:33How bees make honey, just another one of life's little mysteries.
01:38The beeswax?
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