We all know honey as the thick, sweet golden liquid produced by clever bees — but how exactly do bees make honey? It's a remarkable five-step process that turns flower nectar (around 70% water) into the long-lasting golden food we recognise (18% water, sugar-saturated, naturally preserved). Here's exactly how it happens, from flower to capped cell.
Last updated: June 2026
It starts with nectar from flowers
The starting point for honey is nectar — the sugar-rich liquid produced by flowering plants and trees to attract bees and other pollinators. Plants can't move to reproduce, so they need couriers to carry pollen between flowers. Nectar is the reward they offer.
An average honeybee will visit between 50 and 100 flowers in a single foraging trip, and a strong colony will send out tens of thousands of foragers a day during a good nectar flow. That's a lot of work for a single jar of honey at the end of the season — the average teaspoon of honey represents the lifetime work of about 12 bees.
Step 1: Bees collect nectar with their tongue
Bees collect nectar from flowers using their long, tube-shaped tongue (the proboscis). They suck the nectar up and store it in their honey stomach, also known as the crop — a separate stomach used only for carrying nectar, not for digestion.
Step 2: Adding enzymes in the bee's "crop"
While the nectar sits in the bee's crop, a key enzyme called invertase is released. This enzyme begins breaking down the complex sugars in the nectar (mostly sucrose) into simpler sugars (glucose and fructose), which are more stable and resist crystallisation and fermentation over long-term storage.
This enzymatic conversion is one of the reasons real honey lasts essentially forever — sealed honey jars have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, still edible after 3,000 years.
Step 3: Passing nectar bee-to-bee inside the hive
Once the foraging bee returns to the hive, it regurgitates its load of partially-modified nectar directly into the mouth of a younger house bee. The house bee ingests the sugary nectar, adds its own enzymes, and breaks down the sugars further.
This bee-to-bee transfer is repeated several times within the hive — each time, more enzymes are added and a small amount of water evaporates. After several rounds, the modified nectar is finally placed into an empty cell of honeycomb for the final evaporation step.
Step 4: Evaporating water from 70% down to 18%
For honey to be stable for long-term storage, the water content has to drop dramatically. Fresh nectar is about 70% water. Mature honey is around 18% water — concentrated enough that the sugar level prevents most microbial fermentation.
To get there, bees stand on or near the comb cells of nectar and fan their wings vigorously, creating airflow across the hive interior. This evaporates the water out of the nectar over several days. On a warm spring day, you can sometimes hear a strong colony fanning from a few metres away.
Step 5: Sealing the comb with beeswax
Once the honey is at the correct moisture level, the bees seal the cell shut with a thin layer of beeswax, secreted from glands on the worker bee's abdomen. Sealed away from air and water, honey can be stored indefinitely — providing the colony with a perfect food source through autumn and winter when flowers aren't producing nectar.
How much honey can a hive make in a year?
A healthy Australian hive in a good nectar season produces somewhere between 20 and 60 kilograms of surplus honey per year — well above what the colony itself needs to survive winter. The exact amount depends on local nectar flows (eucalypts, clover, lucerne, and other flowering plants in your area), the strength of the colony, and the weather.
The bees will produce more honey than they consume because they're effectively hoarders — they keep storing as long as there's nectar coming in and space in the hive. The beekeeper's job is to give them somewhere to put it (extra honey supers on top of the hive — see our guide to bee hive boxes and frames) and then to harvest the surplus before winter.
When can beekeepers harvest the surplus?
Beekeepers harvest honey when the bees have capped at least 70-80% of the frames in a super. Capped means the bees have decided the honey is ready — water content is low enough for safe long-term storage. Uncapped honey is too wet and will ferment, so harvest timing matters.
To extract honey from the frames, beekeepers slice off the wax caps and then either spin the frames in a centrifuge to fling the honey out (the most common method) or crush the entire comb. Which approach makes sense depends on your scale and budget — see our guide to choosing the right honey extractor, or browse our range of honey extractors.
After extraction, honey is strained, optionally settled to remove air bubbles, and then poured into containers (we stock a full range of honey buckets and pails for bulk storage as well as smaller jars and squeeze bottles).
Thinking of starting your own hive?
Honey-making is just one of the things that makes beekeeping rewarding. If you're considering your first hive, our complete beginner's guide to starting beekeeping in Australia walks through everything you need: the time commitment, the equipment, how to get bees, and what to expect in your first year.
Or browse our range of complete beehive kits and starter tool kits to get set up.
So next time you spread honey on your morning toast, spare a thought for all the work that went into it: dozens of bees, hundreds of flowers, hours of fanning, and weeks of careful storage. It's one of the few foods on Earth that hasn't changed in millions of years — and that's because the process the bees use is genuinely perfect.