Rural Gardening: Bee watering hole?, 0 by arries

arries wrote:
I've heard a couple of times that bees due use water to make honey.

From what I understood, when they first start to make it, it has all the enzymes, but it also has a large percentage of water [it's a clear color, diluted honey, during the process] that gets evaporated, by the bees fanning the hive, and it becomes the thick amber color as we know it in the store. The diluted honey is also used to feed the larvae. I'm not an expert, but I believe I seen that on PBS, and another bee site has a different type of bee that keeps a small percentage of water in it's honey..

They also can't sting if they are full of water because they can't turn their body, so they are defenseless.

edit:
A bee person told me that the water in the honey comes from flower nectar...

This message was edited Aug 4, 2009 8:00 PM

This message was edited Aug 4, 2009 10:12 PM