The Golden Trip of Honey
Have you ever watched honey slide off a spoon? It moves slowly, thick and golden, and it smells a little like flowers. Can you smell that sweetness? Let's find out where honey comes from.
Honey does not grow on a tree the way an apple does. Nobody picks it off a branch. A tiny animal makes it, and that animal is a bee. Let's follow the honey all the way back to where it begins.
It begins inside a flower. Down at the bottom of the petals, the flower makes a sweet juice called nectar. The flower makes that nectar on purpose, to invite bees to come and visit.
A honeybee lands on the flower and sips the nectar with her long tongue, like a tiny straw. She holds it in a special pouch inside her, a honey tummy that carries the nectar home. She visits flower after flower until her honey tummy is full.
While she works, soft yellow flower dust called pollen sticks to her fuzzy body and rubs off on the next bloom, which helps the flowers make new fruit and new seeds. She is a busy little helper.
Now her honey tummy is full. Where do you think she flies next? She flies straight home to the hive, the warm wooden house where thousands of bees live together.
Inside the hive, the bees pass the nectar from mouth to mouth, and they fan it with their wings. Shhh, shhh, go the wings. All that fanning dries the watery part away, so thin nectar slowly turns thick and sweet. Now it is honey.
The bees tuck the honey into a honeycomb, a wall of little wax rooms with six neat sides. They cap each full room with a lid of wax to keep it fresh. That honey is the bees' own food store for winter, when no flowers are blooming.
A beekeeper looks after the hive. She wears a light hat with a soft net, and she puffs cool smoke near the door, because the smoke tells the bees that everything is calm. Then she lifts out one frame of honeycomb and takes only the extra honey, always leaving plenty for the bees.
The beekeeper puts the frames into a big drum and spins them round and round, so the honey flows out of the honeycomb and runs down the wall. She pours it through a strainer to catch the little bits of wax, and then she fills the jars. A driver takes those jars to the shop, and a grown up carries one home to your table.
Let's say the whole trip again. Flower, nectar, bee, hive, honeycomb, beekeeper, jar. Honey comes from bees, who turn the nectar of flowers into thick sweet food. Like milk and eggs, honey is a food that comes from an animal, not something you pick off a plant.
Next time honey shines gold on your spoon, you can remember the flowers, the bees and the honeycomb that made it. What a sweet thing to know.
