Insect Misconceptions and Misinformation   Misconceptions/Misinformation #1: Insects, especially honey bees, do not collect honey from flowers.   Explanation: Bees collect pollen and nectar from flowers. They scrape and comb the pollen from the hairs on their body, compress the individual grains into one collection, and place them in special areas located on their hind legs called "pollen baskets" or corbicula. Nectar is collected from the flowers via their specialized sucking mouthpart, the proboscis, and it is stored in their stomach. Because nectar is dilute (30-70% water), they regurgitate or bring the solution back into their proboscis and fan their wings to increase evaporation, and then suck the more concentrated nectar back inside. Once in the stomach, often called the "honey stomach ", they secrete enzymes that convert the sugar into other sugars. At this point, the solution is about 19% water, and is considered to be honey. A situation similar to this is the making of maple syrup from trees. The sap that is tapped from the tree and collected in buckets is dilute compared to the final end-product, maple syrup. The final step involves the evaporation of a certain percentage of the water, the same method the honey bee uses to concentrate the nectar. One difference, however, is that enzymes are not used to convert sugars from the tree the way it is done in the "honey stomach". Back to Misconceptions