How do bees make honey
To make honey, the worker honeybee sucks nectar from flowers and stores it in its honey stomach.
Once the worker bee returns to the hive, it vomits the nectar into a processor honeybee's mouth. In the processor bee's mouth and stomach, an enzyme called invertase is added to the nectar. Invertase breaks some nectar into simple sugars like glucose and fructose. Then it vomits the partially converted nectar into another processor bee's mouth, who also adds more invertase, helping breakdown more nectar. This process goes on until most of the nectar is converted into simple sugars.
Then the mixture of simple sugars is stored in the honeycomb. At this point, the mixture is still watery. Hence, the bees flap their wings which evaporates water and thickens the mixture to eventually form honey.
From the hive to the pot
From flower, to stomach, to mouth, to mouth again and then into the hive
How do bees make honey? Unlike many other bees, honeybee species don't hibernate in winter. Instead, they stay active in their hives. During the coldest months, honeybees cluster together to keep warm and survive on the sweet substance that they have been hoarding for weeks in advance. That substance is honey.
All of the bees in a hive benefit from the honey haul, but the job of honey production lies with the female worker bees, according to biologists at Arizona State University(opens in new tab). These forager bees fill their stomachs with nectar from flowers before returning to the hive to convert it into honey. Male honeybees, which make up about ten per cent of the hive population, spend their lives eating this honey, before leaving the hive to mate.
There are many factors that determine how much honey a single bee colony will need to produce for a winter period. It depends on the climate where the bees live, how much ventilation the hive has, the number and kind of bees in the hive, according to the Italian Journal of Animal Science (opens in new tab). Honeybees will continue to make honey until every cell in their hive is full.
A Team of Israeli Students Just Created Honey Without Bees
The bee-free honey on the left, and the Israeli team that won the iGEM competition
Can you make honey without honeybees? According to 12 Israeli students who took home a gold medal in the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition with their synthetic honey project, the answer is yes, you can. For the past year, the team from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology has been working on creating sustainable, artificial honey—no bees required. Why? As the team explains in a video on the project's website, "Studies have shown the amazing nutritional values of honey. However, the honey industry harms the environment, and particularly the bees. That's why vegans don't use honey and why our honey will be a great replacement."
Indeed, honey has long been a controversial product in the vegan community. Some say it's stealing an animal's food source (though bees make more honey than they can possibly use). Some avoid eating honey because it is an animal product and bees' natural habitats are disturbed by humans harvesting it. Others feel that because bees aren't directly killed or harmed in the production of honey, it's not actually unethical to eat. However, there's no doubt that the honey industry faces some serious environmental challenges. Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious phenomenon in which worker bees in colonies disappear in large numbers without any real explanation, came to international attention in 2006. Several explanations from poisonous pesticides to immune-suppressing stress to new or emerging diseases have been posited, but no definitive cause has been found. There's also the problem of human-managed honey farms having a negative impact on the natural honeybee population.
So how can honey be made without honeybees? It's all about bacteria and enzymes. The way bees make honey is by collecting nectar from flowers, transporting it in their "honey stomach" (which is separate from their food stomach), and bringing it back to the hive, where it gets transferred from bee mouth to bee mouth. That transferal process reduces the moisture content from about 70 percent to 20 percent, and honey is formed. The Technion students created a model of a synthetic honey stomach metabolic pathway, in which the bacterium Bacillus subtilis "learns" to produce honey. "The bacteria can independently control the production of enzymes, eventually achieving a product with the same sugar profile as real honey, and the same health benefits," the team explains. Bacillus subtilis, which is found in soil, vegetation, and our own gastrointestinal tracts, has a natural ability to produce catalase, one of the enzymes needed for honey production. The product is still currently under development. Whether this project results in a real-world jar of honey we'll be able to buy at the grocery store remains to be seen but imagine how happy the bees—and vegans—would be if it did.
BeeFree
Honeybees produce honey to make the flower's nectar more digestible and well-preserved, using various enzymes secreted in their honey stomach. The honey possesses unique properties that make it highly attractive in fields such as medicine, cosmetics, and the food industry.
Nowadays, the honey industry depends on honey produced by bees, which harms them and their natural social structure. Our vision is to create a sustainable "BeeFree" honey using engineered bacteria, which will process a nectar-like solution using secreted enzymes that mimic the honey stomach environment.
The engineered bacteria will be separated from the final product using membrane-based capsules, providing the bacteria's favorable growth medium inside the capsule, while allowing enzyme secretion to the external "nectar" solution. We have also designed a synthetic circuit that will regulate the transcription of the essential enzymes, enabling us to control the final composition of our BeeFree Honey and tailor it to desired applications.
MeliBio: This Remarkable Food Tech Is Making Real Honey Without Bees
While many food techs have been working on sustainable alternatives for meat, eggs and dairy, there perhaps hasn’t been as much innovation focused on honey – an often overlooked food that vegans avoid due to ethical and environmental reasons, with many turning to substitutes like maple syrup or blackstrap molasses. But this startup is on a mission to make honey that is molecularly identical to the real thing, with the same health benefits and delicious taste, but without any bees involved.
“Being part of the honey industry for 8 years helped me to understand all the challenges ranging from the broken global supply chain to issues of adulteration and most importantly large scale die-offs that threaten 20,000 bee species,” Darko Mandich, the co-founder and CEO of Berkeley, California-based MeliBio, told Green Queen.
“If we don’t bring sustainability through innovation into this industry, it could seriously harm bees and humans. So I decided to move from Europe to California and join the emerging community that is working on producing animal products just without the animals.”
MeliBio Unveils World’s First Real Honey Made Without Bees
MeliBio, Inc. the company using proprietary technology to make real honey without bees has unveiled its first product: world’s first real honey made without bees as a plant-based ingredient for B2B customers and foodservice.
More than 100 members of climate tech, food tech and investor communities in the San Francisco Bay Area had a chance to be among the first in the World to sample MeliBio’s honey made without bees at an event organized at Cell Valley Labs, an incubator and networking space in Berkeley, California. After extensive R&D, MeliBio successfully scaled their method for making honey without bees on a manufacturing level, showing the ability to serve multiple clients in their needs for non-animal honey ingredients. The California-based company is currently taking orders from existing and new foodservice and B2B customers for deliveries starting from the end of 2021, and the beginning of 2022.
MeliBio, Inc. has developed a scientific approach to replace honeybees as a medium of honey production, and is providing solutions to several sustainability and supply chain issues of the broken honey industry valued at $9 billion in 2020. Recent studies show that the industry’s sole reliance on honeybees is making 20,000 wild and native bees crowded out from their habitats and vanishing at an accelerated rate. Additionally, the global honey supply chain faces difficulties in keeping up with demand with recent honey harvests being heavily affected by climate change causing low yields of honey and price volatility.
related:
