Dive Into Honey for National Honey Month: The Fascinating History of Honey Bees
September is National Honey Month, making it the perfect time to celebrate honey, and the remarkable pollinators, plants, ecosystems, and people connected to every jar.
We know honey as the sticky, sweet, golden goodness we drizzle into tea, spread on toast, or enjoy straight from the spoon. But behind every drop is an extraordinary natural history involving millions of years of bee evolution, sophisticated communication, collective behavior, and relationships between bees and flowering plants.
At Planet Bee Foundation, honey is an opportunity for education. Learning how honey bees live and make honey can open conversations about pollinators, biodiversity, food systems, environmental stewardship, and the actions individuals and organizations can take to support healthier ecosystems.
For National Honey Month, let's trace honey from our pantry shelves all the way back to the ancient origins of bees.
Where Did Bees Come From? The Early History of Bees
The evolutionary history of bees stretches back approximately 120 million years to the Early Cretaceous period.
According to a 2023 study published in Current Biology, researchers reconstructed the evolutionary history of bees using genomic, fossil, and biogeographic evidence and concluded that bees most likely originated in Western Gondwana, the ancient landmass that included what are now Africa and South America.
Bee lineages subsequently expanded across much of the world (Almeida et al., 2023), diversifying alongside flowering plants over millions of years. Today, scientists have described tens of thousands of bee species worldwide, occupying an extraordinary variety of habitats and ecological niches.
Most of those bees, however, don't make the honey we're celebrating during National Honey Month. For that, we turn to the honey bee.
What Makes Honey Bees Unique?
Honey bees belong to the genus Apis. Unlike the many bee species that live solitary lives, honey bees are highly social, living in organized colonies made up of a queen, workers, drones, and developing young.
Honey bees aren't the only social bees. Bumble bees and stingless bees do form small colonies, but Apis species possess a remarkable combination of adaptations that allows thousands of individual insects to function together as a colony.
One example is temperature regulation. Honey bees work collectively to regulate conditions inside their nest. They can cluster together to conserve warmth when temperatures fall and use behaviors such as fanning and water collection to help cool the colony when temperatures rise (Milner, n.d.).
Another extraordinary adaptation is the famous waggle dance. When a successful forager returns to the colony, her movements can communicate information about the direction and distance of valuable resources to other workers.
This remarkable form of communication helps individual bees coordinate their collective foraging efforts (Milner, n.d.).
Having thousands of bees living together creates another challenge: How does a colony feed itself when flowers aren't blooming? That's where our National Honey Month star enters the story!
How Do Honey Bees Make Honey?
Honey isn't originally made for humans. Honey is food for the bees!
Flowers produce nectar, a sugary liquid that attracts pollinators. Foraging worker honey bees collect nectar using their proboscis and carry it in a specialized internal pouch called the honey stomach. That's where its transformation into honey begins.
Inside the honey stomach, nectar mixes with bee secretions containing proteins and enzymes that begin altering its chemical composition. After a forager returns to the colony, nectar may also be transferred between workers through a process called trophallaxis, exposing it to additional bee secretions (Washington State University, 2025). Eventually, the processed nectar is deposited into cells in the wax comb.
It isn't honey quite yet, the nectar still contains too much water for long-term storage. Worker bees help remove excess moisture, including by creating airflow with their wings. As water evaporates, the nectar becomes increasingly concentrated.
Once sufficiently ripened, honey can be sealed inside its cell with a thin cap of beeswax and stored until the colony needs it. That means every jar of honey represents an extraordinary biological transformation from flower nectar, collection by a foraging bee and enzymatic processing, moisture reduction to honey for long-term food storage.
Why Do Honey Bees Store Honey?
For honey bees, honey is about survival. When flowers and nectar are abundant, workers collect resources and build food reserves that can sustain the colony when floral resources become scarce—including during winter in colder climates (Washington State University, 2025).
Strong managed colonies may accumulate enough honey that responsible beekeepers can harvest a portion while ensuring that the bees retain the food reserves they need.
While National Honey Month gives us an opportunity to celebrate honey, its evolutionary purpose belongs to the bees. Every spoonful represents a remarkable network of relationships: flowering plants producing nectar, bees visiting flowers as they forage, workers traveling between the landscape and their colony, thousands of bees cooperating inside the hive, and nectar being transformed into a food that can be stored for the future.
Celebrate National Honey Month With a Corporate Honey Tasting Workshop
Want your team to experience honey rather than just read about it?
Book a Planet Bee Corporate Honey Tasting Workshop for National Honey Month!
During this guided experience, participants explore the fascinating world of honey bees and learn how nectar becomes honey while smelling and tasting different honeys and discovering how floral sources can influence their flavors and aromas.
It's a delicious way to combine corporate team building, employee engagement, honey bee education, sustainability learning, and environmental impact.
Planet Bee offers corporate programs virtually and onsite, making it possible to engage
teams across different locations and workplace settings.
Whether your organization is planning a National Honey Month event, employee sustainability program, corporate team-building experience, ESG initiative, environmental awareness campaign, or educational employee event, bees provide a memorable way to bring people together around the natural world.
Corporate participation can have an impact beyond the workplace: proceeds from our corporate programs help directly support environmental STEM education for students.
Looking for more honey bee education?
References
Almeida, E. A. B., et al. (2023). The evolutionary history of bees in time and space. Current Biology, 33(16), 3409–3422. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.07.005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.07.005
Milner, A. (n.d.). Honey bee origins, evolution & diversity. Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association. https://bibba.com/honeybee-origins/
Washington State University. (2025, January 2). Why do bees make honey? Ask Dr. Universe. https://askdruniverse.wsu.edu/2025/01/02/bees-make-honey-2/
Planet Bee Foundation. How bees make honey. https://www.planetbee.org/post/how-bees-make-honey
