Nectar? I Barely Know Her

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. The style and format for today’s episode is going to be a little different from anything I’ve done before. I’m starting a new series under the T.E.A. Time umbrella that I’m calling “From the Ground Up.” In this series, I’ll be taking one thing from the natural world and really looking at it up close. We’ll learn what it is, how it works, why it matters, and a host of other wonderfully interesting facts along the way. I want to learn about each topic with you from the ground up, meaning starting with the basics and building from there.

As I’ve told many of the students I’ve worked with over the years, if you want to speak English fluently, you need to build an English brain. One of the best ways to start is to learn how to think about the world around you in English. My hope is that this series can be both genuinely educational and genuinely enjoyable. To kick off the very first episode, I want to talk about something that almost everyone knows and loves.

There’s an item that you probably have in your home right now that represents multiple lifetimes of work. Every waking hour of the day, a worker devoted their life to its production. In fact, it takes over 500 individuals working together to create a single pound of this precious product. And yet, every year, Americans buy over 400 million pounds of this liquid gold. This product is honey, and those workers are bees. Honey is one of those things we use so casually. We squeeze it into tea without thinking twice. But the story behind every jar is unbelievably complex. Today, we’re going to look at that story from the ground up.

So, what is honey? Simply stated, it is a thick sugar solution made from nectar found in flowers. Nectar is the sweet liquid that flowers produce to attract insects and other animals. In other words, honey is flower juice, transformed. That transformation is the key idea here.

To understand how honey is made, we need to start at the very beginning, with a flower. Plants produce nectar specifically to attract pollinators. A pollinator is any creature that carries pollen from one plant to another, helping plants reproduce. It’s a trade. The flower offers food, and in return, the pollinator carries pollen from flower to flower. That is the starting condition. Without flowers producing nectar, none of what comes next is possible.

Now we can talk about the bee. Bees are social insects, meaning they live and work together in large groups called colonies. A single colony can contain tens of thousands of bees, and every bee has a job. Some bees stay inside the hive and take care of it. Others, called forager bees, leave the hive to find food. When a forager bee finds a flower, she drinks the nectar using her long tongue, called a proboscis. Proboscis is the scientific term for it, not necessarily the everyday word. You can think of it like a built-in straw. The nectar goes into what is called her honey stomach. I want to pause on that for a moment, because it’s one of the more surprising facts about bees. Bees actually have two stomachs. One is for digesting the food they eat themselves. The other, the honey stomach, is specifically for carrying and processing nectar. It’s not a stomach in the way we usually think of one. It’s more like a storage pouch with a very important function.

Once the forager bee has filled her honey stomach, the real process begins. The bee’s body begins adding enzymes to the nectar right away. Enzymes are natural chemicals that speed up reactions in living things. Think of them like tiny workers inside the bee, already starting to change the nectar into something new.

Its honey stomach now full of nectar already in the process of transformation, the bee returns to her hive. Think of what happens next like a relay race. In a relay race, runners pass a baton from one person to the next. Here, instead of passing a baton, each bee passes the nectar, and adds something to it each time. The forager bee passes the nectar mouth-to-mouth to a house bee. The house bees continue the process by regurgitating the nectar enzyme mixture for other house bees to drink up. To regurgitate means to bring something back up from the stomach. I know that doesn’t sound appealing. But what those bees are doing is one of the most efficient natural chemical processes on earth. This continues for around 20 minutes as the nectar is passed between bees, each one adding more and more enzymes. This process is often called nectar ripening.

Eventually, the partially transformed nectar is deposited into a honeycomb cell. But it is not honey yet. At this point it still contains around 70 percent water, which is far too much. So the bees fan it. Hundreds of bees beat their wings over the open cells, creating airflow that evaporates the water. To evaporate means to convert a liquid into vapor or gas. Think of how a puddle disappears after the rain on a warm day. The bees are doing the same thing, just much more deliberately. Slowly, over several days, the water content drops from 70 percent all the way down to about 17 percent.

And here is where the chemistry becomes truly remarkable. As the water leaves, the enzymes the bees added create something called hydrogen peroxide. You might recognize that name from a brown bottle in a medicine cabinet, used to clean cuts and wounds. That hydrogen peroxide, combined with the low water content and the natural acidity of honey, makes it almost impossible for bacteria to survive inside it. Bacteria are microscopic organisms that can cause food to spoil, or go bad. Honey creates an environment where they simply cannot live. The result is a food that does not just last a long time. It essentially lasts forever.

To summarize the whole process in plain language: bees collect nectar, their bodies add enzymes that transform the sugars, and then they evaporate the water until what remains is honey.

Alright. Here is where I get to share the facts that blew me away when I first read them. And with honey, there were several.

Here is the first one. To make a single pound of honey, bees must gather nectar from approximately two million flowers. Two million. Let that number sink in for a moment. And a single bee, flying her entire life, will produce only about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. That is a quantity so small you can hardly see it. The next time you squeeze honey into your tea, you are using the life’s work of multiple bees. That fact changed the way I think about every jar of honey I’ve bought since.

Here is the second genuinely amazing fact. When archaeologists excavated ancient Egyptian tombs, they found sealed jars of honey that were over 3,000 years old. Archaeologists are scientists who study human history by examining physical remains, such as objects, buildings, and burial sites. These archaeologists found the honey, and they tasted it. It was still perfectly edible. Not just safe. Edible. This is not a legend or an exaggeration. It has been confirmed by researchers. Honey is one of the only foods known to truly never expire. The chemistry we just talked about, the low water content, the acidity, the hydrogen peroxide, that is why. Those bees understood something about preservation that humans are still studying today.

Now let’s zoom out for a moment, because honey does not exist in isolation. It is part of something much bigger.

Bees do not make honey for us. They make it for themselves, as a food source to survive the winter months when flowers are not blooming. But the process that produces honey requires bees to visit flowers. And those visits are what pollinate the plants. That pollination is responsible for roughly one third of the entire world’s food supply. Apples, almonds, avocados, blueberries, cucumbers. The list is enormous. If bees stopped visiting flowers, the consequences for human agriculture would be catastrophic. Catastrophic means causing sudden and widespread damage or suffering. We often say we protect bees because we love honey. The more important truth is that without bees, much of what we eat disappears.

For people specifically, honey has been woven into daily life for thousands of years. For most of human history, it was the only sweetener available. Sugar as we know it today did not become widely accessible until the 18th century. Before that, if you wanted to make something sweet, you used honey. It was also medicine. Around 500 of ancient Egypt’s 900 known medical remedies included honey as an ingredient. Hippocrates, the Greek physician often called the father of modern medicine, prescribed honey for a variety of conditions. It was used to preserve food, to preserve the bodies of the deceased, and even to honor the dead. It was offered to gods, buried with pharaohs, and drunk at weddings.

And here is a fact that makes my inner language nerd very happy. The word honeymoon. You have heard it. You have probably used it. But the word traces directly back to an ancient tradition of giving newlyweds a month’s supply of mead. Mead is a fermented drink made from honey. Fermented means it has been allowed to go through a chemical process that produces alcohol, similar to how grapes become wine. The idea behind the tradition was that the sweetness of the honey would mirror the sweetness of the first month of marriage. Every time someone says the word honeymoon, they are unknowingly referencing traditions from hundreds of years ago. Language carries history inside it, and this is one of my favorite examples of it.

Is honey part of the culture where you grew up? I’d love to know how it’s used where you’re from. Is it a food, a medicine, or something else entirely?

Now, there’s one thing worth acknowledging. As demand for honey has grown in the modern world, the question of how to meet that demand without harming bee colonies has become a serious one. Researchers and beekeepers continue to work on finding that balance. It is worth being aware of.

Before we wrap up, I want to give today’s star word the attention it deserves. That word is nectar.

Nectar traces back to the Latin word of the same spelling, which was the name for the drink of the gods in ancient mythology. Mythology refers to the traditional stories and beliefs of a culture, especially those involving gods and supernatural events. In Greek and Roman mythology, nectar was the liquid believed to give immortality, which is the ability to live forever. The gods drank nectar, and that is why they never died.

Over time, scientists borrowed the word to describe the sweet liquid that flowers produce. So when a bee drinks nectar from a flower, she is drinking something that humans once associated with the divine.

In plain terms, nectar is the sugary liquid produced by flowers to attract pollinators. It is the raw material that bees transform into honey.

You will encounter this word far beyond beekeeping. We use nectar poetically to describe anything exceptionally sweet or desirable. “That coffee is absolute nectar.” It transfers across food, literature, and everyday conversation. Once you know it, you will start noticing it everywhere.

And as a bonus word today: trophallaxis. Say it with me: tro-phal-la-xis. I know, it sounds complicated. But all it means is the mouth-to-mouth transfer of food between bees. The bees in the hive practice trophallaxis as part of the process of turning nectar into honey. If you ever want to impress someone at a dinner party, bring up trophallaxis. Tell them it is how honey gets made. You’re welcome.

So, back to where we started. That jar of honey in your kitchen. You probably bought it without thinking much about it. But now you know. You know about the two million flowers. You know about the relay of bees, the enzymes, the evaporation, the hydrogen peroxide. You know it could outlast you by several thousand years. You know that the word honeymoon is historically connected to it. And you know that every time a bee visits a flower to make honey she will never taste herself, she is doing something that quietly keeps a third of the world’s food in production.

Next time you see honey, in a store, on a table, being squeezed into someone’s tea, I hope you see it a little differently. The world was always this interesting. You just needed the words for it. Like nature, we build slowly, from the ground up. Until next time.