@banditloaf @beeeeonka alright! strap yourselves in! how honeybees make honey:

worker bees* go out & forage & suck nectar out of flowers and store it in their special honey stomachs. they go home and pass it into the mouths of 'indoor' bees, who then pass it back and forth (between their mouths) until the moisture content is reduced to around 20%.

Sometimes the nectar is stored at once in cells in the honeycomb, skipping the 'mouth to mouth' pass-the-nectar-parcel part, because some evaporation is caused by the ambient temperature inside the beehive.

It is always 32.5°C inside a honeybee hive, and the honeybees work very hard to maintain it even during heatwaves or in freezing conditions.

anyway, the nectar with reduced water content is now honey. the honey is then stored in cells that they cap with wax to keep it ready for baby bees. when the baby bees come along, the indoor bees add pollen to the honey and feed it to the baby bees.

(this honey+pollen mixture is colloquially referred to as 'bee bread'). So yeah, there you go. The end.

* note on worker bees: the worker bees do EVERYTHING. They nurse babies, they feed babies, they take out the dead, they fan the nectar, they seal the honey, they forage for nectar and pollen....everything everything everything.

Fun fact: honey never goes off. "A slew of factors—its acidity, its lack of water and the presence of hydrogen peroxide—work in perfect harmony, allowing the sticky treat to last forever" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/#:~:text=While%20honey%20is%20certainly%20a,it%2C%20it%20may%20go%20bad.