What Exactly Is Honey Made Of? - video Dailymotion

Skip to player Skip to main content Skip to footer

10/19/2024

You drink it in your tea and spread it on your bread, but what is honey, really?

Category

Transcript

Display full video transcript

00:00What 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

00:15to eat during times of scarcity.

00:17But how do industrious bees make this thick, golden liquid?

00:22It starts when honey bees extract nectar, a sugary liquid, from flowers using their

00:26long, 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

00:39composition and pH, making it more suitable for long-term storage.

00:44When the bee returns to the hive, it passes the nectar to another bee by, well, regurgitating

00:49it into that bee's mouth.

00:51So in one sense, honey is, in part, bee vomit.

00:55The bees repeat this process until the nectar is deposited into a honeycomb for safekeeping.

01:01But at this point, the nectar is still a viscous liquid, nothing like the thick, sugary syrup

01:06you use at home.

01:08To get all that excess water out of the honey, the bees get to work again, fanning the honey

01:13with their wings to speed up the evaporation process.

01:17Once most of the water is gone, the bees seal the honey up in the honeycomb using a liquid

01:22from their abdomen that eventually hardens into beeswax.

01:26The beeswax protects the honey from air and water, so it can be stored safely throughout

01:30the cold, scarce winter months.

01:33How bees make honey, just another one of life's little mysteries.

Recommended

1:39

Up next

8/7/2024

3:44

Learn About: NASA's Lucy Spacecraft Flyby With Asteroid Donaldjohanson

yesterday

1:18

Odd Elongated Martian Cloud Spied By Orbiter

yesterday

8:08

Rocket Lab Ride Back To Earth In This Booster Cam Time-Lapse

yesterday

3:23

Tips To Overcome A Few Retirement Roadblocks

yesterday

1:59

What Is A Taxable Or Tax-Deferred Account?

yesterday

1:48

5 Songs Guitarists Need To Hear By Jeff Beck

yesterday

2:02

5 Led Zeppelin Songs Guitarists Need To Hear

2 days ago

1:58

13 Mummies Coffins Unearthed In Egypt

today

3:37

Paul Explains Schrödinger’s Cat

today

0:44

Amazing Footage Shows Underwater Volcano In Japan Erupting

yesterday

3:30

Facts About Orca Killer Whales

yesterday

1:12

Unexpected Side Effects Of Climate Change

yesterday

2:04

A Trove Of Exceptional Fossils In NSW Australia

yesterday

2:25

What Was the Largest Empire In the World?

yesterday

2:43

Why An Air Purifier Is Worth The Investment

yesterday

2:20

Monarch Butterflies Are Endangered Species Now

yesterday

1:35

Why Are Teeth Not Considered Bones?

yesterday

0:50

A Gigantic Cavity Is Splitting Milky Way Constellations

yesterday

0:44

The Rise And Reign Of The Mammals

yesterday

1:29

How Were the Egyptian Pyramids Built?

yesterday

2:06

Liver: Function, Failure & Disease

yesterday

2:18

What Makes a Cannibal Coronal Mass Ejection

yesterday

2:52

There’s Too Much Gold In The Universe

yesterday

1:36

Earth's First Planetary Defense

yesterday