Honey being strained from extractor (click to enlarge)

3 Queens Apiary honey from hives just 3 miles apart. (click to enlarge)

The Buzz Report: Let's Talk About Honey!
By Linda Lawless LaStayo - 30 August 2026

Over her entire lifetime, a single honeybee will produce only about a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. It takes the combined effort of thousands of bees, visiting millions of flowers, to fill just one jar.

How is honey made?
Summertime in the hive means the bees are busy gathering nectar to make into honey, their carbohydrate source, and pollen, their protein source. Honey begins when forager bees collect nectar and store it in a specialized "honey stomach," where enzymes start breaking down the nectar's sugar (sucrose) into simpler sugars: glucose and fructose. Honey also contains vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, and compounds from the flowers themselves. Back at the hive, forager bees pass the nectar to younger house bees mouth to mouth, from one bee to another. This process adds more enzymes, further breaks down the sugars, and reduces the nectar's water content. The nectar is then deposited into the cells of the honeycomb, where the bees fan their wings to evaporate the moisture down below 20 percent before capping each cell with wax. Thanks to this process, honey is the only natural food that never spoils.

Fun fact: Some joke that honey is "bee vomit." It isn't, really — the honey stomach lacks digestive enzymes, so the nectar regurgitated back at the hive hasn't actually been digested.

Why do different honeys taste and look different?
A honey's unique flavor, fragrance, and color all come from the plants its nectar was gathered from. Even a hive in the exact same location will produce a different honey each year, depending on the weather and which flowers were blooming when the bees were storing up their food.

How does a beekeeper harvest honey?
Beekeepers only harvest honey from boxes on the hive called "honey supers." Luckily, bees make far more honey each year than they need to survive winter, leaving a generous surplus for the beekeeper to collect. Once the honey frames are capped, the honey is ready. The beekeeper removes the wax cappings, then either spins the frames in a honey extractor or crushes the comb and lets the honey drain out. Raw honey is filtered only to remove debris like wax and bee parts — nothing else is added or taken away.

Why does honey crystallize?
All raw honey will eventually crystallize; some nectar sources just crystallize faster than others. Crystallization doesn't affect the quality of the honey, and it can easily be reversed by setting the jar in a warm water bath. Honey that never crystallizes, like much of what's sold in grocery stores, has typically been heated (pasteurized) or heavily filtered. That processing can strip away some of raw honey's best qualities, including its natural pollen and yeasts. So, if your honey never crystallizes, it's a good sign it isn't raw.

Are there health benefits to honey?
Honey is a sweetener, but it has a lower glycemic index than sugar and carries the added benefits of pollen, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. One important note: children underage one should never be given raw honey, due to the risk of infant botulism. Honey can contain botulism spores that adult digestive systems handle easily, but a baby's developing digestive system may not be able to keep the spores from growing.
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So next time you drizzle a little honey on your toast, remember it took a whole hive of very hardworking bees to make that sweet moment happen.

Linda Lawless LaStayo is a Master Beekeeper and the owner and beekeeper of 3 Queens Apiary. She lives and keeps her bee-Utah-ful honeybees in Liberty.