Music: Entertainment Tonight

Feeling: Grossed out

When I got home from work this evening, there was a story on how bees are being attacked by mites (or something) and the population of bees is dwindling. This sparked me to find out exactly how bees make honey.

Did you know that the honey we eat is nectar that bees have repeatedly regurgitated and dehydrated. Kinda gross isn't it?

A bee colony or hive consists of one queen bee, hundreds of drones, and thousands of busy worker bees -- sterile females who gather pollen, produce beeswax, build honeycombs, and make the honey that feeds the other bees. The honeybee uses her tubular tongue to suck nectar from the flower into her abdominal honey sack (the bee's second stomach or "honey stomach"). In the sack, complex plant sugars in the nectar begin to break down into simpler, more digestible sugars. When the sack is full, the bee returns to the hive to offload droplets of nectar to another food-processing worker bee. That bee will distribute it to the young or place it into the honeycomb for long-term storage.

At the hive, "fanning" bees dehydrate and preserve the stored substance by flapping their wings to reduce its moisture content. Later, the individual cells of the comb will be sealed with beeswax, also secreted from the worker's abdomen, and synthesized with the help of honey, to safely preserve the bee's food supply.

The short version, pretty much, is this: the female bee eats pollen, poops out honey and the male bees dry hump and ejaculate on the poop.

Everytime we eat honey, we are actually eating bee poop & bee jizz.

How comforting is that?!

Favorite Diaries

swtapplpie - orlandoninja - zemcomplex - edgarfrog - Fuppa