Bumble bees do store nectar in their nests, and some people call this “honey,” but it bears little resemblance to the thick golden product you buy in a jar. What bumble bees produce is a thin, watery nectar stored in tiny wax pots, enough to feed the colony through a few days of bad weather but nowhere near the surplus that honeybees stockpile. Whether this counts as “honey” depends on how strictly you define the word, and the answer tells you a lot about how differently these two familiar bees actually live.
What Bumble Bees Store in Their Nests
Bumble bee nests contain small wax pots, roughly the size of a thimble, that workers fill with nectar gathered from flowers. These pots sit near the brood cells where larvae develop, and they serve as a communal pantry. Workers returning from foraging trips regurgitate nectar into these containers, and other colony members draw from them when they need fuel. A healthy colony might maintain a few dozen of these pots at any given time. The stored nectar keeps the colony running during rainy stretches or cool days when foragers can’t fly, but it is not a long-term reserve. A bumble bee colony’s entire nectar stockpile could fit in a couple of tablespoons.
Honeybees, by contrast, pack tens of thousands of cells with nectar that they dehydrate, concentrate, and cap with wax. Their honey typically contains less than about 18 percent water, which is low enough to resist spoilage almost indefinitely. Bumble bee nectar pots hold a much more dilute liquid, often above 30 or even 40 percent water. That high moisture content means bumble bee “honey” ferments quickly and does not keep well outside the nest. It is sweeter than plain flower nectar because the bees do concentrate it somewhat, but it never reaches the thick, shelf-stable consistency of honeybee honey.
Why Bumble Bees Have No Need for Large Honey Stores
The fundamental reason bumble bees produce so little stored nectar is their colony lifecycle. A honeybee colony is perennial: the queen and thousands of workers overwinter together, burning through honey stores to keep the cluster warm for months. That survival strategy demands massive reserves, which is why a single honeybee hive can produce 25 kilograms or more of surplus honey in a good year.
Bumble bee colonies, on the other hand, are annual. A mated queen emerges from hibernation in spring, founds a nest alone, and raises workers through the summer. By autumn the colony produces new queens and males, which mate. Then the entire colony dies except for those newly mated queens, who burrow into soil or leaf litter and hibernate individually through the winter. A hibernating bumble bee queen survives on fat reserves stored in her body, not on honey in a nest. There is simply no colony left to feed through winter, so there is no evolutionary pressure to stockpile large amounts of honey.
This lifecycle shapes everything about how bumble bees handle food. Their nectar pots are a short-term buffer, not a pantry stocked for months of cold. Workers keep just enough on hand to ride out a few days of poor foraging weather. If the sun comes out and flowers are available, foragers head out immediately and the colony lives almost hand-to-mouth compared to the warehousing operation inside a honeybee hive.
How Bumble Bees Evaluate the Nectar They Collect
Even though bumble bees don’t amass large honey stores, they are surprisingly discerning about the nectar they gather. Research shows that bumble bees don’t simply go for whichever flower offers the most calories per second. Instead, they weigh both the sweetness and the viscosity of nectar when deciding which flowers to revisit. In one set of experiments, bumble bees were given a choice between a moderately sweet, thin nectar and a sweeter but much thicker nectar. Even when the thicker option delivered a similar energy intake rate, the bees significantly preferred the sweeter, more viscous option, choosing it roughly two-thirds of the time.1Animal Behaviour. Bumble bees’ food preferences are jointly shaped by rapid evaluation of nectar sugar concentration and viscosity When the sugar concentration was equal, though, bees clearly preferred the thinner, less viscous liquid, confirming they can detect and care about how thick a nectar is.
This matters because viscosity creates a physical limit on how fast a bee can drink. Bumble bees lap nectar with their tongues rather than sucking it through a tube the way some butterflies do, and thicker fluids slow that lapping rate. Studies measuring imbibition rates found that bumble bees drink faster as sugar concentration rises, up to about 27 percent sugar by weight. Beyond that point, the increasing thickness of the solution physically slows feeding, even though each tongue-load carries more energy. The sweet spot for energy intake rate turned out to be somewhere around 42 to 56 percent sugar concentration, depending on the solution type.2PubMed. The effect of sugar solution type, sugar concentration and viscosity on the imbibition and energy intake rate of bumblebees In short, bumble bees juggle a trade-off between wanting richer nectar and needing to drink it quickly enough to make a foraging trip worthwhile.
This balancing act has practical implications for what ends up in those wax pots back at the nest. Bumble bees tend to bring home nectar from flowers that hit a productive middle ground: concentrated enough to be energy-rich but not so thick that each flower visit takes too long. The result is a stored product that varies in sugar content depending on which flowers are blooming nearby and what the local conditions allow.
What Happens Inside the Nest With Stored Nectar
Once nectar reaches the colony, it plays a role beyond simple calories. The microbial communities living in stored pollen and nectar turn out to be important for bumble bee health. Researchers investigating the effects of supplementing bumble bee food with bacteria and yeasts found that adding beneficial bacteria to pollen led to faster egg-laying, larger broods, and more workers during the early weeks of colony development.3SpringerLink (Oecologia). Effects of pollen and nectar inoculation by yeasts, bacteria or both on bumblebee colony development Pollen supplementation had a stronger effect than adding microbes to sugar water, suggesting that the solid food stores are a more important microbial habitat than the liquid nectar pots. Still, the nectar environment is not sterile, and the microbial ecology of these stored provisions is an active area of study.
The fungi associated with bumble bee food stores have also attracted attention. Healthy bumble bee colonies harbor particular fungal communities in their stored food and digestive tracts. When researchers exposed bumble bee microcolonies to the fungicide propiconazole, they found evidence that the chemical disrupted these fungal communities, potentially harming the bees not by poisoning them directly but by interfering with their microbial partners.4Ecological Entomology. Bee‐associated fungi mediate effects of fungicides on bumble bees The stored nectar and pollen in a bumble bee nest is not just a food larder but a living ecosystem of microbes that the colony depends on. This is one reason why bumble bee nests are more sensitive to environmental contamination than you might expect for something so small and short-lived.
An Ancient Tradition of Collecting Bumble Bee Nectar
People have known about bumble bee nectar stores for a long time, and in some places they have actively sought them out. In the Nordic countries, collecting nectar from bumble bee nests was a well-known practice within living memory, especially among children. Historical and ethnographic research traces this tradition back at least a millennium, and it appears to have survived into recent generations as a countryside custom.5Ethnobiology Letters. Bumblebee Honey in the Nordic Countries Children would locate a bumble bee nest, carefully open it, and drink the sweet liquid directly from the little wax pots. The quantities were tiny, more of a wild treat than a food source, and the practice was wrapped in local lore about where to find nests and how to avoid getting stung.
This tradition is interesting because it confirms that people have recognized bumble bee nectar as something distinct from honeybee honey for centuries. It was valued not for its volume but as a novelty, a rare taste of wildness that could not be bought in a market. The practice has largely faded as rural childhoods have changed and bumble bee populations have declined in many areas, but it persists in cultural memory and in scattered accounts from older generations across Scandinavia, Finland, and Iceland.
Why You Cannot Buy Bumble Bee Honey
Given that bumble bees do technically produce a honey-like substance, it is reasonable to wonder why nobody farms them for it. The answer comes down to basic arithmetic. A bumble bee colony at its peak might contain a few hundred workers, compared to tens of thousands in a honeybee hive. Those few hundred workers maintain nectar stores measured in grams, not kilograms. Even if you could efficiently harvest from bumble bee nests without destroying the colony, the yield per nest would be vanishingly small. You would need hundreds of colonies to fill a single jar.
Bumble bees are commercially reared, but not for honey. They are raised primarily for pollination, especially in greenhouses growing tomatoes, peppers, and berries. Bumble bees are better than honeybees at “buzz pollination,” a technique where the bee grabs a flower and vibrates its flight muscles to shake pollen loose from tightly held anthers. Tomato flowers require this kind of vigorous shaking, and bumble bees do it naturally. The commercial bumble bee industry is worth hundreds of millions of dollars globally, but it is entirely a pollination business. Nobody in the supply chain is collecting honey from those colonies.
There is also a regulatory dimension. In most countries, “honey” as a food product is legally defined as the substance produced by honeybees of the genus Apis. Bumble bee nectar stores, even if harvested in quantity, would not qualify as honey under food regulations and could not be labeled or sold as such without a specific exemption. This is not just bureaucratic hairsplitting: honeybee honey has distinctive properties, including low water activity, specific enzyme profiles, and antimicrobial characteristics, that arise from the honeybee’s particular processing and storage methods. Bumble bee nectar, with its higher water content and different biochemistry, is a genuinely different product.
How Bumble Bee Foraging Differs From Honeybee Foraging
Bumble bees and honeybees look superficially similar on a flower, but their foraging strategies diverge in ways that matter for what ends up stored at the nest. Honeybees recruit nestmates to productive flower patches through their famous waggle dance, which allows the colony to exploit rich sources efficiently and in large numbers. Bumble bees do not dance. Individual foragers learn profitable flower locations through trial and error, and while they can communicate the presence of food through excited behavior in the nest, there is nothing like the precise directional information a honeybee waggle dance conveys.
Bumble bees also tend to forage in cooler temperatures and lower light levels than honeybees. Their larger, hairier bodies give them better insulation, so they can be out working flowers on chilly mornings when honeybees are still clustered in the hive. This expanded foraging window compensates somewhat for having fewer workers. A bumble bee colony gets more foraging hours per bee, even if it has far fewer bees overall.
The capacity of a bumble bee’s crop, the internal honey stomach where nectar is carried back to the nest, scales with body size. Larger bumble bee species and larger individual workers can carry proportionally more nectar per trip. Research developing allometric models for wild bees confirmed that body size predicts nectar crop capacity, though the relationship needs refinement for eusocial species like bumble bees, whose foragers store nectar for the entire colony rather than just for themselves.6PubMed. How much nectar can wild bees carry? Allometric equations of nectar crop capacities for investigating bee nutrition and foraging ecology A solitary bee gathers just enough for its own offspring, but a bumble bee worker is filling a communal pantry, and the economics of each foraging trip look different as a result.
Other Bees That Make Honey (Besides Honeybees)
Bumble bees are not the only non-Apis bees with stored nectar. Stingless bees, a large group of tropical and subtropical species, produce genuine surplus honey that has been harvested by indigenous peoples for millennia and is now farmed commercially in parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Stingless bee honey tends to be thinner and tangier than honeybee honey, with a more complex flavor profile. Some species produce enough per colony to make small-scale farming viable, though yields are still far below what a honeybee hive delivers.
The key difference between stingless bees and bumble bees, in terms of honey production, is colony permanence. Stingless bee colonies are perennial, like honeybee colonies, so they face the same need to store food through lean periods. That evolutionary pressure has driven them toward larger, longer-lasting nectar stores. Bumble bees, with their annual lifecycle and individually hibernating queens, never had that selection pressure. They evolved to be efficient seasonal operators, not hoarders. The tiny nectar pots in a bumble bee nest are a stopgap, not a savings account, and that is exactly why they produce so little of what we could call honey.