48 Fun Facts About Honey

Honey is sweet mainly because of high concentrations of which two sugars?

Fructose and glucose make up 85-95% of honey's sugars, because enzymes the bees add split the sucrose in nectar into those two simpler sugars.

Besides floral nectar, honey bees also make honey from the sugary secretions of which insects?

Aphids and other sap-sucking insects excrete a sugary liquid called honeydew, and ants prize it so much that they guard aphid herds from predators and stroke them to 'milk' it.

What shape are the cells of a honeycomb?

Hexagonal cells tile with no gaps and need the least wall for the space they enclose, an ancient hunch that mathematician Thomas Hales finally proved in 1999.

Properly stored honey resists spoiling mainly because of which two properties?

High sugar concentration and acidity do it: with under 20% water, honey pulls moisture out of microbes by osmosis, and a pH of roughly 3.2 to 4.5 stops most of the rest.

Cuevas de la Araña, whose prehistoric rock art shows a figure raiding a wild bees' nest, is in which country?

Spain's rock shelters near Bicorp, Valencia, hold the scene, found in 1920; it was long dated to about 8,000 years ago, though some researchers now argue it is nearer 5,000.

Honey traces up to 5,500 years old, hailed as the world's oldest, came from a tomb in which Caucasus-region country?

Georgia's find came in 2003, when Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline work uncovered a noblewoman's tomb stocked with linden, berry and meadow-flower honeys for the afterlife.

As of 2023, which country produces the most honey, roughly a quarter of the world's total?

China harvests about four times as much honey as second-placed Turkey, and after the US hit its cheap exports with steep anti-dumping duties in 2001, smugglers took to relabelling Chinese honey as another country's.

A forager honey bee carries nectar home in which part of her body?

A second, separate stomach called the crop holds about 40 mg of nectar, and filling it can take visits to more than a thousand flowers; the leg baskets carry pollen.

Honey bees survive winter by clustering around the queen and making heat in what way?

Shivering their flight muscles without moving the wings lets workers generate heat, keeping the centre of the winter cluster as warm as 34 °C.

Fresh nectar is mostly water, so how do honey bees thicken it into honey inside the hive?

Fanning it with their wings evaporates the water: nectar arrives at 70-80% water and is capped with wax only once it is down to about 18%.

Before removable frames, harvesting honey from a straw skep often meant doing what to the bees inside?

Killing the whole colony was often the price of a skep harvest, because the comb was fixed inside; keepers relied on early-summer swarms to restock.

Besides masking their alarm scent, how does smoke from a beekeeper's smoker help calm bees?

It triggers a feeding instinct: smoked bees gorge on honey, perhaps readying to flee a fire, and bees busy filling up are less inclined to sting.

Which American developed the movable-comb hive described in his 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee?

Lorenzo Langstroth built his hive around 'bee space', a gap of under a centimetre that bees leave open, so frames lift out without wrecking the comb.

Which scientist decoded the honey bee's waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize?

Karl von Frisch showed that the angle of a bee's waggle run on the comb matches the angle between the sun and the food, so her nestmates know which way to fly.

A honey bee's waggle dance traces out which shape?

A figure eight: the bee waggles along a straight run, circles back one way, repeats the run and circles back the other, and a longer run signals more distant food.

Which secretion, fed to selected larvae, causes them to develop into queens rather than workers?

Royal jelly goes to every larva for its first three days, but only future queens stay on it, and that diet turns an egg that could have been a worker into a queen.

Roughly how many eggs can a well-mated, well-fed queen honey bee lay in a day?

About 1,500 eggs a day, and as many as 2,000 at the spring peak, adds up to more than the queen's own body weight, so attendants feed and groom her around the clock.

Beeswax is produced by glands on which part of a worker bee's body?

The abdomen carries eight wax glands on its underside, which sweat out thin scales of wax in young workers and shrink once a bee starts foraging.

What is the resinous 'bee glue' that honey bees make from tree buds and sap called?

Propolis is plant resin worked with saliva and wax, which the bees use to seal cracks, smooth the hive's inner walls and keep out invaders.

Roughly how many species of bee are known, of which honey bees are only a small fraction?

About 20,000 species are known, and more than nine in ten are solitary bees, such as mason and leafcutter bees, that never build a colony.

The husbandry of stingless bees, practised by the Maya since pre-Columbian times, is known by what name?

Meliponiculture is the keeping of stingless bees, which store their honey in little pots of wax and plant resin rather than in comb; Maya keepers in Yucatán still practise it.

The alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water is called what?

Mead may be the most ancient alcoholic drink of all: 9,000-year-old Chinese pottery held traces of a honey, rice and fruit brew, and an American brewery has since recreated it from the lab analysis.

The 1920s Bee's Knees cocktail shakes honey and lemon juice with which spirit?

Gin is the base of a Bee's Knees, a 1920s sour sweetened with honey instead of sugar, a mix long said to have masked the taste of rough bathtub spirit.

Mānuka honey comes from a shrub that grows wild in south-east Australia and, most famously, which other country?

New Zealand's mānuka honey fetches such prices that rival beekeepers have had hives stolen, poisoned and vandalised in turf wars over the best stands of the shrub.

Hallucinogenic 'mad honey' from rhododendron nectar is produced mainly in Turkey and which other country?

In Nepal it is harvested from cliff nests of the giant honey bee and prized as much for its effects as its taste.

Allies of King Mithridates reportedly left toxic 'mad honey' in the path of which Roman general's army?

Pompey's troops reportedly ate honeycomb left along their route near the Black Sea and were cut down while helpless; Xenophon's Greeks had been floored by the same honey in 401 BCE.

Why should honey never be given to babies under one year old?

Risk of infant botulism: honey can carry bacterial spores that grow and make toxin in a baby's immature gut, so the advice is to wait until the first birthday.

An enzyme that bees add to nectar releases which antibacterial compound when honey is diluted?

Hydrogen peroxide comes from the bees' glucose oxidase, an enzyme that sits all but idle in thick, ripe honey and switches on only when the honey is watered down.

US honey colour is graded on which scale, from 0 ('water white') to over 114 ('dark amber')?

Pfund readings help set a honey's price and its fate: pale honeys fetch more and are sold for the table, while the darkest more often end up as an ingredient in factory food.

Which honey, from a tree of the southeastern US, is famous for not crystallising?

Tupelo honey comes from gum trees in the swamps along Florida's Apalachicola River, where keepers long parked their hives on raised 'bee barges' to catch a bloom that lasts only two or three weeks.

The 'honey' in the biblical 'land of milk and honey' was probably a syrup of which fruit?

Dates fit best: rabbinic texts read the honey as date syrup, and the Bible mentions bees' honey outright only twice, though a 3,000-year-old apiary has been dug up at Tel Rehov.

Which scripture has a chapter titled 'The Bee' that calls honey a drink 'in which there is healing for people'?

The Quran names its 16th chapter, an-Nahl, after the bee, and the verse helped make honey a staple remedy across the Islamic world.

Apples dipped in honey are eaten at which Jewish holiday to symbolise a sweet new year?

The custom was a medieval addition; some Sephardic tables also serve dates, pomegranates and a whole fish with the head intact.

How does Winnie-the-Pooh famously spell honey?

Hunny is what Pooh has written on his jars; taking one to Eeyore as a birthday present, he ate the lot on the way and handed over a 'Useful Pot' instead.

Which African birds lead humans to wild bee colonies to eat the leftover grubs and wax?

The family has 16 species; the birds are also reported to work with honey badgers.

In 2017 the bee mascot vanished from boxes of which breakfast cereal to highlight the decline of pollinators?

Honey Nut Cheerios dropped BuzzBee from its US and Canadian boxes while maker General Mills gave away wildflower seeds for buyers to plant.

Ottoman sultans once presented trays of which honey-soaked pastry to their Janissary troops each Ramadan?

Baklava left the palace kitchens on the 15th of Ramadan, one tray for every ten Janissaries, who paraded it back to barracks until the corps was disbanded in 1826.

In which bee ailment, first reported in 2006, do worker bees vanish and leave behind a queen, brood and full stores?

Colony collapse disorder leaves almost no dead bees near the hive, which is why British beekeepers nicknamed it Mary Celeste syndrome after the ship found sailing with nobody aboard.

A worker honey bee usually dies after stinging a person because her stinger has what feature?

It is barbed like a harpoon, so it lodges in thick skin such as a person's and tears out of the bee, killing her, whereas a bumblebee can sting again and again.

Why do beekeepers hand emptied comb back to the bees instead of melting it down?

Wax costs bees lots of honey, around seven or eight pounds of it for every pound of comb, so a ready-built frame lets the colony bank the next nectar flow straight away.

The Brachygastra of Central and South America are unusual among which group of insects because they make and store honey?

Wasps of this genus, nicknamed honey wasps, stockpile nectar in their paper nests to see the colony through lean spells.

Which fictional detective retires to the Sussex Downs to keep bees and writes a handbook on the queen?

Sherlock Holmes calls his 'Practical Handbook of Bee Culture' the magnum opus of his latter years, written while he watched the hives as he once watched criminal London.

Which sweetener became the most common adulterant in honey from the late 20th century?

Corn syrup is cheap, clear and nearly flavourless, but corn is a C4 plant, so a carbon-isotope test can expose its sugars once they pass about 7% of the jar.

Honey's ability to absorb moisture straight from the air is known by what term?

Hygroscopy is why bakers like honey, since it pulls in moisture and keeps cakes and bread soft, but an unsealed jar can take on enough water to start fermenting.

Creamed honey contains no cream: its smooth, spreadable texture comes from being packed with what?

Tiny sugar crystals, seeded on purpose, stop big gritty ones from forming, and because glucose crystals are white they also leave the honey paler than it was as a liquid.

Honey's sweetness hides an average pH of about 3.9, making it roughly as acidic as which drink?

Orange juice comes in at a pH of roughly 3.5 to 3.8, right beside honey, whose tang comes mostly from gluconic acid that an enzyme from the bees makes as the nectar ripens.

Which moorland honey sets like a jelly in the jar but turns runny again as soon as it is stirred?

Heather honey is thixotropic, a gel that liquefies only while stirred, so it refuses to spin out of the comb like other honeys and is pressed out instead, or simply sold in the comb.

Which Everest pioneer made his living as a beekeeper?

Edmund Hillary worked the family hives with his brother Rex, a trade that suited a climber because the bees kept him busy in summer and left his winters free for the mountains.