How Honey Is Made

How Honey Is Made: From Flower to Jar 

Honey doesn't begin in a jar.

It starts with a flower, a bee, and a landscape.

We often think of honey as something bees simply make. But when you look a little closer, there is much more to it — and much of what makes a honey distinctive happens long before it reaches the hive.

It starts with nectar

Every jar of honey begins with nectar from flowers.

Honey bees travel from flower to flower, collecting nectar and bringing it back to the hive. The nectar is mostly water and sugar at this point, so it still has a way to go before it becomes honey.

And this is where the bees get to work.

The bees transform it

Back at the hive, the nectar is passed between worker bees. Enzymes naturally present in the bees' process begin changing the nectar, while the bees place it into the cells of the honeycomb.

The next part is surprisingly simple.

The bees fan their wings, helping water evaporate from the nectar. As the moisture decreases, the nectar becomes thicker and more concentrated.

When the honey is ready, the bees seal the cell with a thin layer of beeswax.

For the colony, this is food. They are carefully stored for when flowers are no longer readily available.

But the landscape matters too

This is the part we find especially interesting.

The bees may make the honey, but the flowers give it much of its character.

The flowers available to the bees influence the honey's colour, aroma, flavour and texture. The season matters. The weather matters. And, of course, the landscape matters.

A hive surrounded by Jarrah trees in Western Australia is working with a very different floral landscape from a hive surrounded by Manuka.

The result is honey that can look, smell and taste completely different.

So when we taste a honey, we're tasting more than sweetness. We're getting a little sense of where it came from.

And then there are the beekeepers

Once the honeycomb is filled and capped, the beekeeper can harvest the surplus honey.

Good beekeeping is about more than collecting honey. The colony needs its own food too, so the beekeeper has to work with the bees and the seasons, rather than simply taking every honey that the hive produces.

The honey is harvested from the frames, extracted from the comb and strained to remove pieces of wax and other natural material.

The honey can then be stored and eventually bottled.

And somehow, something that began as nectar in a flower has made its way into a jar on our kitchen table.

From flower to jar

That journey is what makes honey so fascinating to us.

A flower produces nectar.

A bee finds it.

The bees bring it home and transform it.

The landscape gives it character.

A beekeeper cares for the colony and harvests the surplus.

And eventually, we get to taste it.

It is easy to look at a jar of honey and see only the finished product.

But there is a whole world behind it.

A flower. A landscape. Thousands of bees. And the people who care for them.

That's where honey begins.