Honey Trivia
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48 free Honey trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
44 free honey trivia questions with answers. This honey trivia quiz is for anyone who has wondered what actually happens between the flower and the jar. It covers how honey bees turn nectar into honey (the honey stomach, the relay of regurgitation, the 35 °C hive), why honey never spoils, the waggle dance, royal jelly, beeswax and propolis, and the beekeeper's tools from the smoker to the Langstroth hive. It then ranges wider: the world's biggest producer, the oldest honey ever found, the cave painting of a prehistoric honey hunter, mead and its many names, mānuka and mad honey, honey as medicine and why infants must not eat it, plus honey in the Bible and the Quran, at Rosh Hashanah, in baklava and in the Hundred Acre Wood. About a third of the questions are easy, a third medium and the rest are for beekeepers and biologists. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on honey, bees and beekeeping or another encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Honey is sweet mainly because of high concentrations of which two sugars?
Fructose and glucose
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.
Q 02Besides floral nectar, honey bees also make honey from the sugary secretions of which insects?
Aphids
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.
Q 03What shape are the cells of a honeycomb?
Hexagonal
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.
Q 04Properly stored honey resists spoiling mainly because of which two properties?
High sugar concentration and acidity
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.
Q 05Cuevas de la Araña, whose prehistoric rock art shows a figure raiding a wild bees' nest, is in which country?
Spain
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.
Q 06Honey traces up to 5,500 years old, hailed as the world's oldest, came from a tomb in which Caucasus-region country?
Georgia
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.
Q 07As of 2023, which country produces the most honey, roughly a quarter of the world's total?
China
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.
Q 08A forager honey bee carries nectar home in which part of her body?
A second, separate stomach
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.
Q 09Honey bees survive winter by clustering around the queen and making heat in what way?
Shivering their flight muscles
Shivering their flight muscles without moving the wings lets workers generate heat, keeping the centre of the winter cluster as warm as 34 °C.
Q 10Fresh nectar is mostly water, so how do honey bees thicken it into honey inside the hive?
Fanning it with their wings
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%.
Q 11Before removable frames, harvesting honey from a straw skep often meant doing what to the bees inside?
Killing the whole colony
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.
Q 12Besides masking their alarm scent, how does smoke from a beekeeper's smoker help calm bees?
It triggers a feeding instinct
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.
Q 13Which American developed the movable-comb hive described in his 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee?
Q 21The husbandry of stingless bees, practised by the Maya since pre-Columbian times, is known by what name?
Meliponiculture
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.
Q 22The alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water is called what?
Mead
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.
Q 23The 1920s Bee's Knees cocktail shakes honey and lemon juice with which spirit?
Gin
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.
Lorenzo Langstroth
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.
Q 14Which scientist decoded the honey bee's waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize?
Karl von Frisch
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.
Q 15A honey bee's waggle dance traces out which shape?
A figure eight
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.
Q 16Which secretion, fed to selected larvae, causes them to develop into queens rather than workers?
Royal jelly
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.
Q 17Roughly how many eggs can a well-mated, well-fed queen honey bee lay in a day?
About 1,500
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.
Q 18Beeswax is produced by glands on which part of a worker bee's body?
The abdomen
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.
Q 19What is the resinous 'bee glue' that honey bees make from tree buds and sap called?
Propolis
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.
Q 20Roughly how many species of bee are known, of which honey bees are only a small fraction?
About 20,000
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.
Q 24Mānuka honey comes from a shrub that grows wild in south-east Australia and, most famously, which other country?
New Zealand
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.
Q 25Hallucinogenic 'mad honey' from rhododendron nectar is produced mainly in Turkey and which other country?
Nepal
In Nepal it is harvested from cliff nests of the giant honey bee and prized as much for its effects as its taste.
Q 26Allies of King Mithridates reportedly left toxic 'mad honey' in the path of which Roman general's army?
Pompey
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.
Q 27Why should honey never be given to babies under one year old?
Risk of infant botulism
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.
Q 28An enzyme that bees add to nectar releases which antibacterial compound when honey is diluted?
Hydrogen peroxide
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.
Q 29US honey colour is graded on which scale, from 0 ('water white') to over 114 ('dark amber')?
Pfund
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.
Q 30Which honey, from a tree of the southeastern US, is famous for not crystallising?
Tupelo
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.