How Bees Make Honey

One little honeybee visits about 100 flowers on a single trip! To fill just one small jar with honey, bees make thousands and thousands of trips. Let's find out how they turn flower juice into the sweet honey on your toast.

In this lesson you will: - Find out what bees drink from flowers - See the steps that turn nectar into honey - Learn why bees store honey in a wax comb

Flowers make a sweet juice called nectar. A honeybee sips the nectar with a long tongue, like drinking through a tiny straw. The bee keeps the nectar in a special honey tummy, not the tummy it uses for its own food. Then it flies back home to the hive.

Back home, the bee passes the nectar from its mouth to another bee's mouth. They do this again and again. This mixing helps turn the runny nectar into thicker honey. The nectar is still too watery, so bees flap their wings super fast to fan it, like a little fan drying a puddle. The extra water dries away and the honey gets thick and gooey.

Bees build tiny rooms out of wax called a honeycomb. Each little room has six sides, the shape we call a hexagon. Bees pour the honey into these rooms. When a room is full, the bee puts a wax cap on top, like a lid. The honey stays fresh so the whole hive can eat it in winter when there are no flowers.