The world of honey is wonderful!
There are several factors that affect honey’s color and flavor; however, the main factor is the collection of nectar from bees, they visit around 50 to 100 different flowers on each one of their trips. The honey process is extremely interesting and it’s an excellent example of good teamwork. The bees go through 4 crucial steps until they reach the decadent syrup.
Step 1. The worker bees collect nectar.
When the working bees finally find the nectar they want, they use their proboscis (elongated appendix located on the head) to suck the sugar from the flowers. With a little saliva from the bee, it is stored in a special sac in the stomach, when this sac is full the bee returns to its hive to leave all the nectar.
Step 2. The nectar is sent home.
As honey passes from one bee to another, the enzymes in their saliva change the pH and other chemical changes occur. At this stage the mixture contains a lot of water so the bees work to dry it little by little.
Step 3. Dehydrate the honey.
Some water is removed while the honey is passed from bee to bee, but what dehydrates the honey the most is when it is passed into the honeycomb. When the bees spread the honey in the hexagons, as it has more space, honey can evaporate its water particles faster. Something incredible about this process is that thanks to the constant movement of the bees’ wings there is a constant air flow that causes the water content in the honey to go from 70% to 17-20% at most.
Step 4. The honey is stored in the honeycomb.
The last step is how the honey is stored. When the honey is in its respective hexagon, the bees cover it with wax that they make. This is to maintain the freshness of the honey until the moment that they decide to feed from it. Or in another case, when us humans decide to harvest it.
It is an amazing teamwork!
The Pfund scale gives us a reference to the different colors that we can find in raw honey, based on millimeters and optical density. Each color can be located in this color reference:
