Is honey spit out or pooped out by bees?

Honey is a necessity in almost every household, have you ever wondered where the delicious honey comes from? Some people say honey is bee poo, others say honey is bee vomit ...... We might as well look at the whole process of honey made by bees to find the answer.

Bees are social insects, and a bee colony is a biological unit on which bees depend for survival. A normal honey bee colony is composed of a queen, tens of thousands of worker bees, and hundreds of males bred during the breeding period.

The worker bees, which are overwhelmingly dominant in numbers, are a class of female bees with underdeveloped reproductive organs whose function is to collect pollen, and nectar, make honey, feed larvae and queens, and build nests.

Nature's arrangement is interesting in that flowering plants need bees for pollination, and nectar is one of the rewards paid to pollinators. Bees collect nectar to make honey and to provide nutritional support for the entire colony society.

The starting material for honey bee production is nectar, a liquid sugary substance secreted by the plant's nectaries, usually with a water content of between 60% and 80%. The worker bees usually suck the nectar with a proboscis (tubular tongue) located in their "chin" and store it in a "honey sac" on their body.

The "honey pack" is located between the esophagus and the anterior stomach, but does it have anything to do with the bee's stomach? The "honey sac" is a "backpack" for worker bees to store nectar and does not have a digestive function. The honey bee's stomach is a digestive organ that can digest food.

The honey bee's well-developed "honey sac" is very contractible. By contracting the "honey sac", the nectar collected can be returned to the mouth. It takes about 1,000 flowers for a bee to fill its "honey sac". The next task is to return home to unload and start a new round of nectar collection.

Bees do not need additional machinery to make honey from nectar, but they do need enzymes secreted by the bees and the close collaboration of many worker bees to do so. The chemical composition of nectar is extremely complex and varies from flower to flower, but in general, it can be considered an aqueous solution of sugars. Most of the sugars in nectar are sucrose, with concentrations ranging from about 4% to 60%.

The key to making honey from nectar is to break down the sucrose and other sugars in the nectar into fructose and glucose and to reduce the moisture in the nectar to less than 18%. The processing of honey begins on the return journey of the honey collector bees, as complex sugars such as sucrose enter the conversion process under the action of conversion enzymes.

When the worker bees arrive home, they are not slowed down at all in the "honey workshop". They even accept the honey from their sister's mouth to mouth, unload it, and use the enzymes they secrete to complete the subsequent conversion of sucrose into simple sugars. The nectar is converted into honey when the concentration of sucrose drops to 5% (10% for some honey) by the action of enzymes.

The moisture content in honey is also an important indicator. If the moisture content is too high, it is not conducive to storage and is also susceptible to rancidity and deterioration. When the moisture content of honey drops to 35%- 40%, the bees fill it with liquid droplets in the form of a wax honeycomb.

The design of the honeycomb is very careful, the temperature and ventilation inside are conducive to the evaporation of water from the honey. To "shorten the working period", the worker bees keep fanning to speed up the evaporation. When the water content of the honey drops below 18%, the bees will cover the honey with beeswax. At this point, the honey-making process is complete.

With the above analysis, it seems that the answer to the opening question can be found. "The argument that honey is bee poop is untenable because the waste produced by the body's metabolism and expelled from the anus is called poop. The honey sac, where the nectar is stored, is separated from the bee's digestive stomach by a muscular valve, so honey can't enter the stomach (digestive stomach), much less the intestines, rectum, and anus downstream.

The honey bee has always been known as a "biological machine" that makes honey. If you consider the honey bee's "honey sac" as a storage and processing unit, then her mouth is a loading and unloading port, from which both nectar and honey pass.

As for the statement "honey is the bee's vomit", it is also a misconception. This is because vomit is the material that is involuntarily expelled from the stomach. Although nectar or honey can also pass in and out of the bee's mouth, it is the honey's nature to do so on its own. Not to mention that the honey does not even reach the bee's stomach.