¿Cómo recogen la miel las abejas?

Bees live entirely on flowers, including pollen and nectar, and sometimes brew and store them into honey. It is well known that bees collect honey. In the flowering season of plants, you can often see many bees busy on flowers, but many people know very little about how bees collect honey. Let’s take a look at how bees collect honey!

1: Collection tools

The worker bees in the bee colony can collect honey. The worker bees have a pair of symmetrical upper jaws on their mouthparts that can chew solid pollen. The lower lip, lower jaw, and tongue form a slender tube that can penetrate into the flowers to absorb nectar. At the same time, the appendages of the worker bees are specialized into pollen baskets and pollen combs. When the worker bees collect nectar in the flowers, their feet are covered with pollen. Then the worker bees will use the “pollen comb” on the tarsus of the hind feet to comb the pollen off and collect it in the “pollen basket”. Finally, the pollen is fixed into a ball with nectar and brought back to the hive.

2: Scouting the source of nectar

Before going out to collect nectar on a large scale, the bee colony will first send out scout bees to find the source of nectar. Generally, the old worker bees in the bee colony will be responsible for this. After finding the source of nectar, the scout bees will collect a small amount of nectar or pollen and share the collected nectar or pollen with other worker bees. At the same time, they will “dance” to inform the distance and direction of the nectar source plants, and then a large number of worker bees will go to the nectar source to collect. PS: Bee dance is a language for bees to communicate, and different dance moves have different meanings.

3: Bee colony collection

After the collecting bees arrive at the nectar source, they will start the busy collection work, and the bees are selective about the flowers when collecting nectar. Generally, bees will not collect flowers that are about to bloom or have just opened. The objects of picking are mainly blooming flowers, because the nectar or pollen of such flowers is the richest. At the same time, bees like yellow, white and blue flowers the most, especially yellow, which is the most attractive to bees.

This is why plants with bees as the main pollinating insects all have yellow flowers.

4: Making honey

After the bees come back from collecting honey, they will give the nectar or pollen to the clerk bees. At this time, part of the nectar or pollen is used to feed the young bees, and the other part is taken by the clerk bees to a place where the honeycomb is not crowded. The clerk bees face up and maintain a certain posture, then open their upper jaws, and make honey by opening and closing the curved part of the beak end. If the external nectar source is abundant and the clerk bees do not have time to brew, they will store the nectar in the honeycomb. When the nectar is fully mature, the clerk bees will store it in the honeycomb and cover it with wax.

Honey collection by bees is an extremely complicated process, and it is also a time when the worker bees work intensively. The bee colony needs to collect about 1 million flowers to brew 1 kilogram of honey. During the high honey flow period, most worker bees have a lifespan of only 28 days, and the reason is basically that they die of overwork.

Deli Foods Group Co., Ltd. adheres to the attitude of striving for excellence, strictly controls the source, ensures the natural taste and quality of honey, and provides the purest high-quality honey. Welcome to consult.