Slimy but tasty: did you know that honey is bee vomit?

For those who prefer to avoid sugar but not miss the chance to sweeten life, honey is one of the most versatile tools out there. The 100% natural material goes well with that little fruit salad as well as a good oatmeal pot or even a pancake topping. Nothing like watching the luscious liquid running down the food and thinking about the sweet taste, right? Even with all the beneficial properties and fantastic taste, one fact about the item is unchanging: Honey is bee vomit.

Calm down, you don't have to spit out the sweetened toast or chopped bananas and run to the sink to rinse your mouth in running water! The whole process of creating the product is extremely clean - after all - it's part of the nature of the pets and has a strong foundation in our old schoolmate, Chemistry. So the best thing to do is to eat your snack or dessert again and see exactly how honey is produced before it is collected by man - or a certain bear that inhabits Yellowstone Park.

Spit from here, excrete from there

Those who have green near home know how bees love to “date” flowers all over the neighborhood, flying back and forth and landing a little on each one. What happens is that the nectar of the plants is very tasty and nutritious for these animals, causing workers to leave the hive and visit about 1, 500 flowers on their journey to collect the resource. While a portion of it is used to power the insect, a separate stomach can hold up to 70 milligrams of the element.

When they are full, these bees return home as they digest some of the material, which is broken down into glucose and fructose. Since workers are not the most suitable for the digestion task - after all, they are older and have few of the enzymes needed for the operation - they need to pass the material on to other of their colleagues, the engineers. How is the "load" passed from one to another? Simply put, the collector throws up semi-digested nectar in her mate's mouth. Cool, right?

Young and with a much larger amount of enzymes, the engineer continues the product transformation process, keeping it inside for about half an hour until - guess what - regurgitate it once more. At this point you might be asking, "But guys, do you need this?" And the answer to that question is a resounding "yes!" At this point in the championship, more than 70% of the liquid's composition is water, so it needs to be deposited in the alveoli - the hexagonal holes - to dry.

When the amount of water reaches about 18% - after a few days of waiting - the bee responsible for the cubicle excretes a wax to seal and protect the resource until, in effect, it becomes the delicious honey. The work is so hard and the engineer so dedicated that, on average, every bee produces in her life only 1/12 of a teaspoon of the material - which gives you a sense of how many hives a beekeeper needs to collect. equivalent to a small jar of honey.

A feminine touch

Does knowing that natural honey manufacture involves a good deal of spewing, secretion, and drying make it less tasty for you, or is it worth the end result of this series of chemical reactions? It is worth noting that all this work is done solely and exclusively by the "young ladies" among the bees, since both the workers 'and engineers' classes are made up only of female insects. Clap for the girls!

* Posted on 10/02/2016