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Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made by several species of bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. [1] [2] Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies.Bees produce honey by gathering and then refining the sugary secretions of plants (primarily floral nectar) or the secretions of other insects, like the honeydew of aphids.
Honey bees obtain all of their nutritional requirements from a diverse combination of pollen and nectar. Pollen is the only natural protein source for honey bees. Adult worker honey bees consume 3.4–4.3 mg of pollen per day to meet a dry matter requirement of 66–74% protein. [52]
Honey bees consume about 8.4 lb (3.8 kg) of honey to secrete 1 lb (450 g) of wax, [1] and so beekeepers may return the wax to the hive after harvesting the honey to improve honey outputs. The structure of the comb may be left basically intact when honey is extracted from it by uncapping and spinning in a centrifugal honey extractor.
The western honey bee or European honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most common of the 7–12 species of honey bees worldwide. [3] [4] The genus name Apis is Latin for 'bee', and mellifera is the Latin for 'honey-bearing' or 'honey-carrying', referring to the species' production of honey.
Unlike the worker bees, drones do not sting. Honey bee larvae hatch from eggs in three to four days. They are then fed by worker bees and develop through several stages in hexagonal cells made of beeswax. Cells are capped by worker bees when the larva pupates. Queens and drones are larger than workers, so require larger cells to develop.
Painted wooden beehives with active honey bees A honeycomb created inside a wooden beehive. A beehive is an enclosed structure where some honey bee species of the subgenus Apis live and raise their young. Though the word beehive is used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature distinguishes nest from hive.