How a colony works, how honey gets made, and a few things about bees that are worth knowing.
A healthy honeybee colony in summer holds somewhere between 50,000 and 80,000 bees. Every bee has a role, and those roles shift with age and season. The colony functions as a single organism — no individual makes decisions, but the collective does.
One per colony. She lays up to 2,000 eggs per day at peak season and can live 3–5 years. When she fails, workers raise a new one by feeding a selected larva royal jelly for its entire development.
All female. A worker's job changes as she ages — nurse bee, comb builder, nectar handler, then forager. She flies up to 5km in search of flowers. In summer she lives about six weeks. Her wings simply wear out.
Male bees. They don't forage, don't sting, and don't build comb. Their only purpose is to mate with virgin queens from other colonies. In autumn, workers stop feeding them and push them out.
Temperature regulation is a good example of the collective in action. When it's too hot, bees fan the entrance and bring in water to cool the brood. When it's cold, they cluster tightly and vibrate their flight muscles to generate heat — maintaining the brood nest at almost exactly 35°C regardless of what's happening outside.
Swarming is how colonies reproduce. When a hive gets crowded, the old queen leaves with roughly half the workers to find a new home. It looks chaotic — a swirling cloud of bees — but a swarm that's just left the hive is at its most docile. They have nothing to defend.
Honey starts as nectar. A forager bee draws it into her honey stomach — a separate organ from her digestive stomach — visiting between 50 and 100 flowers before flying back to the hive. Here's what happens next.
A forager collects nectar and stores it in her honey stomach. During the flight home, enzymes begin breaking down the complex sugars. A colony might send out 10,000 foragers simultaneously on a good day.
Back at the hive, the forager passes the nectar mouth-to-mouth to a house bee — a process called trophallaxis. It might be passed between several bees, each adding enzymes that convert sucrose into glucose and fructose.
The nectar is deposited into open cells in the comb. At this stage it's about 70–80% water — too wet to store without fermenting. Bees fan it constantly with their wings for days, driving evaporation.
When the water content drops to around 17–20%, the honey is ripe. The bees seal the cell with a thin wax cap. Capped honey is stable indefinitely — the low water content and acidic pH prevent microbial growth.
The beekeeper removes frames of capped honey, uncaps the cells, and spins them in an extractor. The honey is strained to remove wax, then jarred. Raw honey is not heated — heat destroys enzymes and changes the flavour.
To produce a single kilogram of honey, a colony flies a combined distance of roughly 90,000km and visits somewhere around four million flowers. That's not a metaphor. It's just arithmetic.
Archaeologists have found honey in Egyptian tombs more than 3,000 years old that was still perfectly edible. The low water content, acidic pH, and naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide make it essentially shelf-stable forever if kept sealed and dry.
When a forager finds a good food source, she returns and performs a waggle dance on the comb. The angle of the dance relative to vertical encodes the direction of the food relative to the sun. The duration encodes the distance. Other bees read this and fly directly there.
In her six weeks, a forager contributes roughly 0.8ml of honey. A 500g jar represents the combined lifetime work of around 750 bees, plus countless others who handled the nectar inside the hive.
Studies have shown honeybees can learn to distinguish individual human faces, using a strategy similar to how we process them — reading the configuration of features as a whole. They can remember which face was associated with a reward.
Bees can't see red, but they can see ultraviolet. Many flowers have UV patterns on their petals that act as landing guides pointing toward the nectar — completely invisible to us, but clear to a bee.
The queen can sting repeatedly. Drones have no stinger at all. A worker's stinger is barbed and lodges in mammal skin, pulling the venom sac with it and killing the bee. The venom sac continues pumping after separation — removing the stinger quickly reduces the dose.
Workers have eight wax glands on their abdomens. They consume honey and convert the energy into wax, which secretes as tiny flakes they chew and mould into comb. It takes roughly 8kg of honey to produce 1kg of wax.
Raw honey will eventually granulate — the glucose crystallises out of solution. How quickly depends on the floral source. Honey that granulates hasn't been adulterated or heavily processed. To return it to liquid, place the jar in warm (not hot) water.
Every colony has a unique chemical signature — a blend of pheromones, propolis, beeswax, and the particular forage mix of that hive's territory. Bees use this to identify nestmates at the entrance and reject strangers.
Roughly a third of global food production depends on pollination by insects, with honeybees doing a significant share alongside native bees and other pollinators. The honey is a side effect — the real product is the movement of pollen between flowers.
Small batches from two hives in the Yea Valley. Raw, unfiltered, and limited.
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