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50 free Honey trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free honey trivia questions with answers. This honey trivia quiz is for anyone who has wondered what actually happens between the flower and the jar. It covers how honey bees turn nectar into honey (the honey stomach, the relay of regurgitation, the 35 °C hive), why honey never spoils, the waggle dance, royal jelly, beeswax and propolis, and the beekeeper's tools from the smoker to the Langstroth hive. It then ranges wider: the world's biggest producer, the oldest honey ever found, the cave painting of a prehistoric honey hunter, mead and its many names, mānuka and mad honey, honey as medicine and why infants must not eat it, plus honey in the Bible and the Quran, at Rosh Hashanah, in baklava and in the Hundred Acre Wood. About a third of the questions are easy, a third medium and the rest are for beekeepers and biologists. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on honey, bees and beekeeping or another encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
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Q 01Honey is sweet mainly because of high concentrations of which two sugars?
Fructose and glucose
It has roughly the same relative sweetness as table sugar, and a tablespoon carries about 43 kilocalories.
Q 02Besides floral nectar, honey bees also make honey from the sugary secretions of which insects?
Aphids
That sticky liquid is called honeydew, and honey made from it tends to be dark and strong-tasting.
Q 03What shape are the cells of a honeycomb?
Hexagonal
Bees eat roughly 8.4 pounds of honey to secrete a single pound of the wax the comb is built from.
Q 04Properly stored honey does not spoil. Which two properties are the main reason?
High sugar concentration and acidity
Bees also add glucose oxidase, which produces hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid, both of which suppress bacteria.
Q 05Cuevas de la Araña, with 8,000-year-old cave paintings of humans foraging for honey, is in which country?
Spain
The famous image shows a figure on a ladder or ropes reaching into a wild nest while bees fly around.
Q 06The oldest known honey remains, up to 5,500 years old, were found in a tomb in which country?
Georgia
They turned up during construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline; the dead were buried with linden, berry and meadow-flower honeys for the afterlife.
Q 07Which country produces the most honey, about 24% of the world total?
China
Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran are the next-largest producers of the roughly 1.9 million tonnes made each year.
Q 08A foraging bee's honey stomach holds about 40 mg of nectar. What proportion of its own weight is that?
Half
Filling it can mean visiting more than a thousand flowers and over an hour of continuous work.
Q 09Bees keep the honey-storage areas of the hive at roughly what temperature?
35 °C (95 °F)
They are among the few insects that can generate large amounts of body heat, and they fan their wings to evaporate water from the ripening honey.
Q 10Finished honey has a water content of roughly what percentage?
15.5-18%
Fresh nectar is 70-80% water; the bees evaporate most of it, then cap each cell with wax so no moisture can get back in.
Q 11On average, how much honey does a single hive produce in a year?
About 29 kg (65 lb)
Before removable frames were invented, harvesters often destroyed the whole colony to take the honey and replaced it the next spring.
Q 12Why does smoke from a beekeeper's smoker calm bees?
It triggers a feeding instinct
The bees gorge on honey as if preparing to flee a forest fire, which makes them less inclined to sting.
Q 13Which American developed the movable-comb hive described in his 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee?
Lorenzo Langstroth
Q 21The husbandry of stingless bees, practised by the Maya since pre-Columbian times, is known by what name?
Meliponiculture
Stingless bees store their honey in little pots of wax and resin rather than in hexagonal comb.
Q 22The alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water is called what?
Mead
It may be the oldest alcoholic drink of all, possibly discovered 20,000-40,000 years ago before agriculture or pottery.
Q 23Mead flavoured with spices has what name?
Metheglin
Melomel is the fruit version, and Norse myth held that the Mead of Poetry, brewed from the blood of Kvasir, turned drinkers into poets.
He was the first to exploit the 'bee space' of 6-9 mm that bees leave open rather than filling with wax.
Q 14Which Austrian ethologist decoded the honey bee's waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize?
Karl von Frisch
The dance's angle from vertical on the comb tells other bees the direction of flowers relative to the sun, and its length tells the distance.
Q 15A honey bee's waggle dance traces out which shape?
A figure eight
Foragers use it to tell hive-mates the direction and distance to flowers, water or a possible new nest site.
Q 16Which secretion, fed to selected larvae, causes them to develop into queens rather than workers?
Royal jelly
Workers extend the chosen cells and keep feeding the larvae the jelly instead of switching them to bee bread.
Q 17Roughly how many eggs can a well-mated, well-fed queen honey bee lay in a day?
About 1,500
The queen is the only fertile female in the colony, and her egg-laying can outweigh her own body mass over the course of a day.
Q 18Beeswax is produced by glands on which part of a worker bee's body?
The abdomen
Eight wax glands on the abdominal segments secrete tiny scales, and the glands wither as the bee ages into a forager.
Q 19What is the resinous 'bee glue' that honey bees make from tree buds and sap called?
Propolis
Bees mix the resin with saliva and wax and use it to seal gaps in the hive.
Q 20Roughly how many species of bee are known, of which honey bees are only a small fraction?
About 20,000
All non-parasitic bumblebees and stingless bees make honey too, and Mayans farmed stingless bees long before Columbus.
Q 24Mānuka honey comes from bees foraging on Leptospermum scoparium, a tree native to which country?
New Zealand
Mānuka is the tree's Māori name; the honey is marketed as 'liquid gold' and rated by the UMF grading system.
Q 25Which compound, abbreviated MGO, is the marker used to grade authentic mānuka honey?
Methylglyoxal
Australian producers require independent lab tests for MGO, dihydroxyacetone and leptosperin before honey can carry the mark of authenticity.
Q 26Hallucinogenic 'mad honey' from rhododendron nectar is produced mainly in Turkey and which other country?
Nepal
In Nepal it is harvested from cliff nests of the giant honey bee and prized as much for its effects as its taste.
Q 27In 65 BCE Mithridates reportedly used mad honey against the Roman soldiers of which general?
Pompey
Xenophon had already described Greek soldiers near Trabzon being laid low by the same honey in 401 BCE.
Q 28Why should honey never be given to babies under one year old?
Risk of infant botulism
Honey can carry Clostridium botulinum spores that an infant's gut cannot yet control; after a year it is considered safe.
Q 29Glucose oxidase, added to nectar by bees, produces gluconic acid and which antibacterial compound?
Hydrogen peroxide
That is one reason medical-grade honey products have been approved by the FDA for minor wounds and burns.
Q 30US honey colour is graded on which scale, from 0 ('water white') to over 114 ('dark amber')?
Pfund
Grading is voluntary in the US and follows USDA standards; dark honeys such as buckwheat sit at the top of the scale.