Bee Gold: Why Honey Is An Insect Superfood

Bees separated from wasps about 120 million years ago, during an increase in the evolution and spread of flowering plants. This floral diversity – along with a change in the behavior of bees that feed on pollen, rather than insects, to bee larvae – has spurred the evolution of some 20,000 bee species known today. .

Becoming an expert honey producer required some additional behavioral and chemical tricks. The bees began to add some nectar to the pollen, which turned it into more transportable packets. They also developed wax-secreting glands, which provided a way to store liquid nectar and solid pollen separately.

“Wax makes for a very flexible building material,” says Christina Grozinger, an entomologist at Penn State University, who studies the mechanisms underlying the social behavior and health of bees. When forming a honeycomb, honey bees mold the wax into hexagons, which turns out to be the most efficient shape for storing something, as the hexagons pile up tightly together. “It’s a feat of engineering,” says Grozinger.

Another benefit of building many small, uniform cells is that more surface area means water evaporates faster, and less water means less microbial growth.

The process of producing honey that will fill these cells begins as soon as a foraging bee sucks up the nectar. While it may seem like she eats it, the sugary snack doesn’t end up in her stomach, at least not in the traditional sense. She stores it in her crop, or her honey stomach, where it mixes with various enzymes.

One of the first enzymes to work is invertase, which cuts the sucrose molecules in nectar in half, producing the simple sugars glucose and fructose (strangely, research suggests that bees don’t have the genes to make this enzyme. cut of sucrose – a microbe that lives in the guts of bees probably does). Returning to the hive, the honey bee then regurgitates the payload to the first of a bee assembly line. The following mouth-to-mouth water content decreases and introduces more enzymes, processes that continue to break down the nectar and prevent germs from growing.