Well they do vomit it, just without human assistance. FWIW though, a honeybee produces about a single teaspoon in its whole life, and also tame honeybee colonies tend to psuh out natural honeybee populations, so whether it’s ethical to eat honey or not is a fair question.
FWIW though, a honeybee produces about a single teaspoon in its whole life
Keep in mind though that a honey bee worker only has a working lifespan of a few weeks (though they can survive for months if born during the cold off seasons where they stay huddled in the hive), and each hive has between 40,000 and 80,000 bees. Kept hives also don’t need as much of the honey they produce since the beekeeper can control for climate, colony size, and other factors that increase consumption.
Pushing out native bees is definitely a major problem, I agree on that, though beekeepers should be managing their colonies to prevent them from splitting and creating new hives.
Bees have a separate stomach just for storing nectar that doesn’t have any digestive juices, so it’s not vomit vomit, but they do swallow the nectar down as they drink it from flowers and then regurgitate it back up into a cell in the wax comb back at the hive. They then evaporate most of the water out of it with air from their wings. When it’s full of honey, they cap the cell off with more wax.
At some point the beekeeper takes a portion of the honeycomb out of the hive, and brushes any bees still on it off into the hive. The caps are cut off to let the honey out, and then typically it is centrifuged to get the honey out quickly. There’s a lot more details of course, but that’s the jist of it.
Wait then how DO they make honey?
Well they do vomit it, just without human assistance. FWIW though, a honeybee produces about a single teaspoon in its whole life, and also tame honeybee colonies tend to psuh out natural honeybee populations, so whether it’s ethical to eat honey or not is a fair question.
Keep in mind though that a honey bee worker only has a working lifespan of a few weeks (though they can survive for months if born during the cold off seasons where they stay huddled in the hive), and each hive has between 40,000 and 80,000 bees. Kept hives also don’t need as much of the honey they produce since the beekeeper can control for climate, colony size, and other factors that increase consumption.
Pushing out native bees is definitely a major problem, I agree on that, though beekeepers should be managing their colonies to prevent them from splitting and creating new hives.
https://youtu.be/tKweqxWUC38
Unless you’re in Eurasia, the natural populations aren’t honeybees.
No that’s Minions right?
Bees have a separate stomach just for storing nectar that doesn’t have any digestive juices, so it’s not vomit vomit, but they do swallow the nectar down as they drink it from flowers and then regurgitate it back up into a cell in the wax comb back at the hive. They then evaporate most of the water out of it with air from their wings. When it’s full of honey, they cap the cell off with more wax.
At some point the beekeeper takes a portion of the honeycomb out of the hive, and brushes any bees still on it off into the hive. The caps are cut off to let the honey out, and then typically it is centrifuged to get the honey out quickly. There’s a lot more details of course, but that’s the jist of it.