How do bees survive on a diet of essentially pure sugar?

Question

I have seen lots of posts about the diversity of the human diet compared to other animals and have learned a lot about how animals can synthesize nutrients or they have diets that are more diverse than we realize. But am I wrong to think that bees only eat honey which is essentially sugar? Could a human live on a diet of a proportional amount of honey to our size?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Bees don’t just eat pure sugar, they also harvest pollen from flowers which supplies the proteins and fats they need, especially as developing larvae.