Food - Drink
You'll Probably Never Guess What Honey Actually Is
By NATASHA BAILEY
Honey is a sweetener made entirely from nature, making it seem purer than refined sugar, molasses, and agave — which must all be heavily processed to enjoy. Odds are that you know honey comes from bees' hard work, nectar, and honeycombs, but making honey is a much more complicated process than that.
As bees fly from flower to flower, they spread pollen as they go, but their main purpose is to collect nectar from the flowers. Nectar is essentially a watery and sugary substance that bees harvest through their tongues and store the extra in their "crop" stomach, where a chemical process begins.
Since nectar is mostly water, it must interact with enzymes in bees’ salivary glands to chemically change nectar’s complex sugar into simple sugar. They then regurgitate the nectar into a honeycomb, which helps dry out the nectar, aided by bees fanning it with their wings, and evaporate the excess water in the chemical-altered nectar to create honey.
