Insects That Eat Honey

The honeybee, or Apis mellifera, is an insect that has the ability to turn plant nectar into a concentrated form known as honey. The resulting honey product is sweet to the taste for humans, mammals and other insects, but it is not for taste that honeybees do this. Rather, they are storing this food for cold winters. This storehouse of nutrients, however, often is fed upon by other insects not native to the hive.

  1. Honeybees

    • The honeybees that make the honey are the first to eat and benefit from it. Honey is made by the bees when they collect nectar from pollinating flowers and refine it in their honeycombs to produce a concentrated version. This honey serves as a food source upon which the bees will rely when winter sets in and the nectar they are used to eating from the flowers is gone. Honey takes longer to metabolize in the system than pure nectar, so it serves as a better food resource in the winter months.

    Wasps/Yellow Jackets

    • Yellow jackets often station themselves outside honeybee colonies to try to devour the carcasses of any dead bees that the colonies have rejected. Yellow jackets also are aggressive and will enter a colony to seek out a honeybee to attack and kill. While inside, it will feast upon the honey it finds.

    Wax Moths

    • Wax moths enter bee colonies after dusk to lay their eggs inside the honeybee combs. While doing so, the moth is provided an easy meal by the honey in the combs. The honeybees try to remove what eggs they can from the combs, but with thousands of combs in a hive, that is nearly an impossible task. Some eggs will remain and hatch. When they do, the honey provides an excellent food source right there for the taking.

    Roaches

    • Roaches find that bee hives and wooden bee colonies constructed by humans are excellent places to find shelter from the elements and predators. They eat the honey in the hive because it is a readily available food source in their new home, eliminating the need to seek food elsewhere in the often-dangerous wild.