Don’t forget the fact that this is all started by horny plants who only dress up nicely and offer sweets to allure innocent little bees because dirty as they are plants want bees to touch their genitalia to smear pollen all over their bodies as the little ones fly from plant to plant, exchanging pollen by means of a never ending bukkake.
Never Ending Bukkake is going to be my band name.
Not to be all “Well ackchyually” but most (maybe all?) of the moisture reduction happens after the nectar has been stored in the comb, but before it has been capped with wax for storage. So the bottom two panels are out of order.
Also, if anyone cares, the term for the mouth-to-mouth passing of the nectar is trophallaxis.
Maybe the reading order is U shaped.
Ↄ shaped
Wait, is it really just nectar with less water content then? Could we make honey ourselves without all the bees by just collecting a bunch of nectar and evaporating off some of the water?
I think having thousands of insects collect that nectar is more efficient than trying to do it by hand. But I’d be curious to taste if the bees impart any additional flavor. I know honey made by giving bees primarily sugar water doesn’t taste like much, but there could be other stuff going on with the nectar inside the bee.
Have you ever tasted flower nectar?
I grow gladiolus sometimes, and they produce a lot of nectar, but there aren’t any pollinators for those flowers around me, so I remove the nectar myself with a syringe. There isn’t a lot in each flower, but it’s nice in a cup of tea.
It doesn’t really taste like honey, even dilute honey. It doesn’t taste like just sugar water, either, though. I’m sure each flowering plant produces a subtly different flavor, like fruit.
And indeed, honey apparently tastes different depending what the bees are feeding on. But I’d say it’s probably a mix of something bee-specific and the nectar itself.
The bit about flowers creating different honey is VERY true, here in sweden it’s popular to make honey specifically from heather and it’s distinctly different from regular honey.
My dad favours clover honey.
