Hey Honey

We are blessed with some of the best honey in the world, which is fortunate, as we cannot import any other honey. Our honey rules are so strict that it is unlikely that you’ll taste adulterated honey here, unlike many other countries. In New Zealand we have some unique nectar producing plants and trees that bees use to make honey and they are not found anywhere else in the world. While the generic “honey”, both runny and creamed, has never been so cheap at the supermarket, there is so much more to honey than that.

The average worker bee will collect enough nectar to make a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey, or 0.8 grams in her lifetime. In the summer, when bees are making their honey, the average worker bee will live for around 42 days (it’s much longer in the Winter – about 6 months). They’re so much busier in summer, they literally work themselves to death. Worker bees have a variety of jobs as their bodies develop, culminating in their last job - foraging. As soon as they emerge from their cells they clean cells and feed brood; they lose the ability to make the food, also known as royal jelly after a while and their wax producing glands mature. While still house-bees they could be undertakers, fanners to air condition the hive, water carriers, or nectar receivers and then their last job before becoming a forager is to be a guard bee at the entrance to the hive.

Once bees have learned the most important task – how to orientate themselves so that they can return to the hive, they go out foraging for nectar. As the bee’s first three weeks are spent as a house-bee, they usually have only three weeks of foraging left to collect their 0.8g of nectar. A fully laden bee can only carry 60mg (0.06g) of nectar in one trip, often less. This is about half her body weight. She will usually only go one or two kilometres for each journey, but she will go up to five kilometres if there aren’t flowers closer. Bees have a “honey stomach” that they store the nectar in on their return flight, she also adds an enzyme that starts the process to transform the nectar into honey. As soon as she goes back into the hive she’s greeted by a receiver, who takes the regurgitated nectar into her “honey stomach” and takes it further into the hive. This also starts drying out the nectar, which is completed in the cell. Nectar is usually 80-90% water and honey must be below 20% water. During the foragers short life, it will often only go to one type of flower; this honey is called mono-floral (from only one source). If there are lots of different plants flowering nearby, then the result would be multi-floral. Mono-floral honeys have a distinctive flavour depending on which flower it came from, but more about that next month. So, next time you’re spreading honey on your toast consider that bees had to visit +/- 4,000,000 flowers to make a kilogram jar of honey and they would have flown the equivalent of around the world a couple of times to do so.

Honey is so much more than a lot of processed foods we have available to us; it is produced by hard working beekeepers and their millions of bees with a recipe unchanged for tens of millions of years.

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