How do bees make the beeswax for their honeycombs?

HONEY


Honeybees use nectar to make honey. Nectar is almost 80% water with some complex sugars. In fact, if you have ever pulled a honeysuckle blossom out of its stem, nectar is the clear liquid that drops from the end of the blossom. In North America, bees get nectar from flowers like clovers, dandelions, berry bushes and fruit tree blossoms. They use their long, tubelike tongues like straws to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their ';honey stomachs';. Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach. The honey stomach holds almost 70 mg of nectar and when full, it weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill their honeystomachs.





The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar onto other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee's stomach through their mouths. These ';house bees'; ';chew'; the nectar for about half an hour. During this time, enzymes are breaking the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars so that it is both more digestible for the bees and less likely to be attacked by bacteria while it is stored within the hive. The bees then spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it a thicker syrup. The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is gooey enough, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year, a colony of bees eats between 120 and 200 pounds of honey.





WAX





How do bees make wax?





This is fascinating. Worker bees鈥搘hich live about five weeks in the summer鈥搈ake wax from about the 10th day of their lives to the 16th. When workers are roughly 10 days old, they develop special wax-producing glands in their abdomens. They eat lots of honey. The glands convert the sugar in the honey into wax, which seeps through small pores in the bee's body leaving tiny white flakes on its abdomen. These bits of wax are then chewed by the bees. The chewed wax is added to the construction of the honeycomb. The cluster of bees means the hive temperature stays at around 35 degrees Celsius, which keeps the wax at just the right consistency鈥搃t's not too hot to be drippy and not too cold to be brittle.





Bees build combs to store honey to fed themselves through winter when there are no flowers. Honeycombs aremade up of six-sided tubes. Mathematicians have figured out that the shape is very efficient鈥搃t uses less wax for the volume of honey held, than other shapes (triangular or square tubes).


How do bees make the beeswax for their honeycombs?
*raises hand*... pick me, pick me.. I know this from college!!





Worker bees of a certain age will secrete beeswax from a series of glands on their abdomens. They use the wax to form the walls and caps of the comb.





Cheers =)How do bees make the beeswax for their honeycombs?
If I flirt with you will you promise to stop asking these types of questions, lol, they make them very carefully