All about honey

What is honey?

A thick, golden liquid produced by European honey bees (Apis mellifera), and a small number of warm-climate native bee species, honey is made using the nectar of flowering plants and is stored in the hive for eating during winter and times of scarcity.

Locally, in western Victoria, honey is very much a seasonal yield, with honey bees building up their stores as summer commences, and into autumn with the arrival of widespread local native flora such as manna gums, pasture flowers such as clover, and various garden flora.

In a spring and summer season, if there are lots of flowers blooming with nectar, there may be one or more harvests of honey before the cold weather begins, but the beekeeper must make sure the bees have sufficient honey to last them through winter.

How do honey bees make honey?

Nectar – a sugary liquid – is extracted from flowers using a bee’s long, tube-shaped tongue (proboscis) and stored in a special stomach, or “honey crop, where it mixes with enzymes that transform the nectar’s chemical composition and pH, making it more suitable for long-term storage.  A honey bee can carry a payload of nectar or pollen close to her own weight.  

When a honeybee returns to the hive, she passes the nectar to another bee by regurgitating the liquid into the other bee’s mouth (called trophallaxis). This process is repeated until the partially digested nectar is finally deposited into a call in the honeycomb.

Once in the honeycomb, nectar is still a runny liquid — unlike viscous honey. To get all that extra water out of their honey, bees begin fanning the honeycomb with their wings to promote the process of evaporation.

When most of the water has evaporated from the honeycomb, the bees seal the cells of the honeycomb with a secretion of liquid from their abdomens, which eventually hardens into beeswax. Away from air and water, honey can be stored indefinitely, providing bees (and people!) with an energy-rich food source for cold winter months.

Are there different types of honey?

Honey’s color, taste, aroma and texture vary greatly depending on the type of flower a bee frequents. Clover honey, for example, differs greatly from the honey harvested from bees that frequent a lavender field, or from nectar foraged from lucerne flowers.

Some common floral Australian honeys are yellow gum and red gum; other popular varieties are clover, and orange blossom.  Single variety honey is also represented by manuka (Leptospermum scoparium) flowers, where hives are placed for bees to forage almost exclusively on this one species of flower. 

Honey may be a multifloral, with a range of flowers within foraging distance of the hive, or trans-seasonal, with different harvests during the season yielding a range of floral contributions.  Single-source, or single-origin honey, is unique –individual hives’ honey is harvested in separate batches to showcase each hive’s own honey, rather than blending with other hives.

How do I best enjoy and appreciate honey?

It’s best to store honey at room temperature, away from direct sunlight, and enjoy it just as the bees created it. Honey naturally thickens, or crystallises, over time, and you may find your jar of runny honey solidifies – it’s perfectly normal, and all you need to do is warm the jar gently in a bowl of hot water to liquify the honey. 

A worker bee may gather enough nectar to make less than one-tenth a teaspoon of honey in her short life, so be sure to enjoy every precious drop of golden goodness.   For lovers of sustainable, local, boutique honey, it’s a feast for the senses, and its seasonal availability is a reflection of a truly natural product.