Honey is tasteful and great with pretty much everything. But honey does not only have great nutritional value and is the favorite treat of many but also plays an important role in the complex cycle of nature turning sunlight into life.
It starts with plants that are the best at producing sugars from sunlight. And they also live pretty much everywhere, which is great but they need help. Plants rely on insects like bees to spread their pollen so they can reproduce.
But bees don’t work for free, so plants need to produce sugar nectars too so they can attract bees. And when a bee land on a flower to collect its pollen and nectar at the same time, it spread the pollen of previous flowers.
After the nectar is collected, bees get back to their hive to leave it where house bees hold the nectar on their tongues to dry, after which they place it in hexagonal boxes where it is stored to supply the colony.
A typical hive can have more than 50 000 bees. These 50 000 bees are believed to travel in total nearly 4 million kilometers. And these 50 000 bees visit around 100 million flowers.
But all of these impressive numbers stand behind just 30 kilograms of honey. Not a lot, but bees manage to produce more than enough honey to survive the winters.
Of course, not only bees love honey. Humans, bears, and honey badgers are in the list of honey lovers, among many more.
