To Bee or Not to Bee

To Bee or Not to Bee

By Susan Langenhennig Granger

When planning for the afterlife, ancient Egyptians wanted to cover all their bases — even the need to satisfy a sweet tooth. So, they tucked pots of honey into the tombs of great pharaohs.

When planning for the afterlife, ancient Egyptians wanted to cover all their bases — even the need to satisfy a sweet tooth. So, they tucked pots of honey into the tombs of great pharaohs.

In 1922, when British Egyptologist Howard Carter discovered King Tut’s tomb, he unearthed more than 100 baskets filled with the remnants of food, including a ceramic jar that still had honey residue inside, according to National Geographic . As the story goes, some (fearless? crazy?) archaeologists even tasted it, and it was perfectly edible.

In their quest for immortality, Egyptians turned to a remarkable product that truly has a nearly eternal shelf life: honey. The secret lies in its high sugar content, low water content and acidic pH.

Naturally antibacterial, antifungal and antiviral, honey is truly one of the world’s most magical substances, used for centuries to brew beer, make wine, sweeten foods, heal wounds, embalm the dead, fight wrinkles and even help with upset stomachs.

“The medicinal importance of honey has been documented in the world’s oldest medical literatures,” according to the National Library of Medicine. “Human use of honey is traced to some 8,000 years ago as depicted by Stone Age paintings. The ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Greeks and Romans employed honey for wounds and diseases of the gut.”

So just how do bees make this magical elixir? They’re busy.

A LITTLE NECTAR, A LOT OF WORK

Long before the golden liquid lands on store shelves, female worker bees (yep, just the females) fly out of the hive, landing on flowers, where they fill their “crops” or “honey stomachs” (a real term) with sugary nectar. Inside their bellies, the nectar is broken down into simple sugars. Once their bellies are full, they return to the hive where they then regurgitate the nectar. (As tempting as it might be, don’t call it bee vomit. Many apiculturists take issue with that term, pointing out that the bees are not digesting the nectar in the way that mammals digest our food.)

After they spit up their nectar, it gets passed around the hive. “Each bee chews the nectar for around half an hour before passing it onto the next bee, slowly turning it into a syrup,” according to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (a British registered wildlife charity). Once the honey is ready, the bees store it inside honeycomb cells.

Making honey is no small task. “Bees will fly upwards of 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) to collect nectar and pollen from flowers,” according to Arizona State University’s “Ask a Biologist.”

Bees don’t do all of this just for humans to sweeten their morning oatmeal. Honey is the primary food for bees and bee larvae.

Pollen, which gets picked up on the bees’ legs and hair when they’re crawling around the flowers, also becomes a good source of protein for bee larvae back at the hive. But before they return home, the bees accomplish an important task in the food chain. All that buzzing around facilitates pollination, allowing the plants to produce fruit and seeds — leading to crops that end up in the produce aisles of your neighborhood Rouses, the perfect symbiotic relationship. (Isn’t Mother Nature fascinating!)

Almond growers, especially, rely on bees for their crop. “In order for the almond flower to be fertilized, it has to be cross-pollinated with pollen from a different variety of tree,” according to Select Harvest USA. “Bees provide the perfect mechanism of transferring this pollen from the two or three varieties of almond trees that the typical farmer has in his orchard. And in order to create a single almond, an almond blossom needs as many as a dozen visits from bees.”

FROM HIVE TO JAR

Beekeepers have been harvesting honey from hives for centuries. Each hive, on average, produces about 55 pounds of surplus honey per year, according to the National Honey Board. “Beekeepers harvest it by collecting the honeycomb frames and scraping off the wax cap that bees make to seal off honey in each cell. Once the caps are removed, the frames are placed in an extractor, a centrifuge that spins the frames, forcing honey out of the comb,” the Honey Board says.

Once the honey is extracted from the comb, commercial bottlers strain it to remove any bee bits (legs, wings, wax and other things you don’t want in your cup of tea).

“After straining, it’s time to bottle, label, and bring it to you,” the National Honey Board says. “It doesn’t matter if the container is glass or plastic, or if the honey is purchased at the grocery store or farmers’ market. If the ingredient label says ‘pure honey,’ nothing was added from bee to hive to bottle.”

SO WHY DOESN’T HONEY SPOIL?

Honey has very little moisture content, and bacteria needs water to survive. Keeping the hive dry is key, and bees make sure of that. By flapping their wings inside the hive, they help to evaporate the nectar.

“The sticky goo starts out as flower nectar, containing about 60% water,” McGill University reports. “Bees add enzymes that break down the complex carbohydrates to simple sugars and then store the nectar in honeycombs where the water content is reduced to about 18% through evaporation.”

Another key to honey’s longevity? Bees have an enzyme that mixes with the nectar to make hydrogen peroxide, helping to make honey antibacterial, according to the National Library of Medicine.

IMPORTANCE OF POLLINATORS

Enjoying a spoonful of honey in your yogurt isn’t the only way that humans benefit from bees’ hard work. Honeybees pollinate nearly 80% of all flowering plants, including more than 130 types of fruits and vegetables, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which estimates one out of every three bites of food is created with the help of pollinators.

And the western honeybee Apis mellifera (also called the European honeybee) is the main species responsible for bee pollination worldwide, according to the National Library of Medicine. So, if we want a healthy dinner menu, we need bees.

In recent years, alarm bells have been sounding about the health of bee populations, both in the United States and around the globe, with hives threatened by parasites, pests, poor nutrition, pesticides, climate change and Colony Collapse Disorder.

“Colony Collapse Disorder is the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees and the queen,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency. “Once thought to pose a major long-term threat to bees, reported cases of CCD have declined substantially over the last five years.”

Still, beekeepers and farmers remain concerned — and vigilant — to threats to the bee population. “Beekeepers across the United States lost 45.5% of their managed honey bee colonies from April 2020 to April 2021,” according to Auburn University’s reporting on a nationwide survey conducted by the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership. “These losses mark the second highest loss rate the survey has recorded since it began in 2006.”

Because of the threats to bees, it’s become an all-hands-on-deck effort to figure out the best ways to keep the hives healthy. Beekeepers, agricultural agencies and researchers, Auburn says, “have been working together to understand why and develop best management practices.”