Honey is a sweet and viscous substance made honey smacks several bees, the best-known of which are honey bees. Honey is made and stored to nourish bee colonies. Honey bees stockpile honey in the hive. Within the hive is a structure made from wax called honeycomb.

The honeycomb is made up of hundreds or thousands of hexagonal cells, into which the bees regurgitate honey for storage. Honey for human consumption is collected from wild bee colonies, or from the hives of domesticated bees. The honey produced by honey bees is the most familiar to humans, thanks to its worldwide commercial production and availability. Honey is sweet because of its high concentrations of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose. Honey use and production has a long and varied history, with its beginnings in prehistoric times. Several cave paintings in Cuevas de la Araña in Spain depict humans foraging for honey at least 8,000 years ago.

A honey bee with its proboscis extended into a calyx of goldenrod. Honey is produced by bees who have collected nectar or honeydew. After leaving the hive a foraging bee collects sugar-rich nectar or honeydew. In Apis mellifera the honey stomach holds about 40 mg of liquid. This is about half the weight of an unladen bee. Collecting this quantity in nectar can require visits to more than a thousand flowers. When nectar is plentiful it can take a bee more than an hour of ceaseless work to collect enough nectar to fill its honey crop.

Once filled, the forager bees return to the hive. There they regurgitate and transfer nectar to hive bees. Once in their own honey stomachs the hive bees regurgitate the nectar, repeatedly forming bubbles between their mandibles, speeding its digestion and concentration. Hive bees form honey processing groups. These groups work in relay, with one bee subjecting the processed nectar to bubbling and then passing the refined liquid on to others. It can take as long as 20 minutes of continuous regurgitation, digestion and evaporation until the product reaches storage quality. The new honey is then placed in honeycomb cells, which are left uncapped.

Bees are among the few insects that can create large amounts of body heat. They use this ability to produce a constant ambient temperature in their hives. This temperature is regulated either by generating heat with their bodies or removing it through water evaporation. The evaporation removes water from the stored honey, drawing heat from the colony. The bees use their wings to govern hive cooling.