The world’s honey supply is in trouble: Why bees are suddenly making less honey than before

A lemon honey water, some pancakes or a pastry. This is how many of us begin our mornings. While all of us may be living different lives, there's one thing common to them: the sweetness of natural honey. The dollop that we oh so graciously add to our food seems like an undying nature's nectar filling our lives with sweetness and smiles.

However, it seems the world will soon lose all its honey. Every jar of honey that is filled with the bees' hard work is a chemical archive of the flowers they visited and the hard work they pushed through in the season.

This year, things went a bit off track for the worse. Somewhere between the cool nights of February and the heat of March, the flowers opened ahead of schedule. They held for a week less than they should have and closed before the hives were ready. The honey that could have come out of this cycle did not.

But this time, it is not about the bees dying and how they could be saved. It's a lot more complicated, serious and worrying. It's about the timing. About the ecological clock that keeps the bees and flowers in a synchronous cycle and how its disturbance is not good news.

Tick, tick, boom

Just like humans, flowers follow a growth period supplemented by ideal conditions. Temperatures, rainfall, and daylight all align in the right proportions to create the nectar in a narrow window timed with precision to attract the insects it needs.
This timing is governed by phenology, or the study of cyclical and seasonal natural phenomena, and it determines everything from when a mustard field turns yellow to when the first bees emerge from their winter torpor.
This is a survival mechanism in which animals conserve energy by drastically reducing their heart rate, metabolic rate, and body temperature when the weather is cold and there is food scarcity.

For years, this cycle flowed easily. Flowers bloomed, bees appeared, nectar flowed and honey was ready. But now, climate change has entered the chat. Research published in Ecological Monographs in 2025 found that while individual plant and pollinator species are advancing their phenology at broadly similar rates in response to rising temperatures, the overall overlap between plant flowering and pollinator activity is declining at the community level.

In India, where over 80 per cent of honey comes from the indigenous Apis cerana indica bee species and where bees alone contribute approximately 20 per cent of total crop yield, this quiet unravelling has consequences that reach far beyond the hive.

Humans, stop

What's the cause of all these problems? HEAT. Nectar, a sugary liquid is secreted by specialised tissues in the flowers to attract bees. The bee carries nectar back to the hive, where it is processed, dehydrated, and stored in wax cells. Now, with excessive heat in play, things are not as easy anymore.

A landmark study published in Frontiers in Plant Science in 2011 examined the impact of temperature rise and water stress on floral nectar.

When temperatures rose by 6°C and water stress was applied simultaneously, nectar volume per flower dropped by 60 per cent, and pollen weight per flower fell by 50 per cent. Meaning flowers still grew, opened up, but offered nothing to the buzzing visitors.

Research on Mediterranean plant species published in 2015 in the journal AoB PLANTS confirmed that strong warming as predicted by climate models for the end of the 21st century is expected to significantly reduce nectar secretion, cutting resources for both wild bees and honeybees.

Honey not honey?

A 2022 study published in Frontiers in Microbiology also revealed that the quality of honey might be impacted. Extreme temperatures affect the microbial communities living inside the nectar itself and replace the beneficial Lactobacillus species with more heat-tolerant bacteria. This may potentially alter the chemistry, flavour and attractiveness of nectar for bees.

When warming and drying occur together, the study found, the potential for bees to compensate by shifting their foraging in time or space is severely constrained, revealed by an analysis of 2,500 honey samples collected across Europe and published in the journal Nature Communications.

With India's climate, the consequences are already becoming known. A field study published in Biological Conservation in 2017, conducted in Odisha's Koraput and Rayagada districts, found that four out of five native bee species had declined by up to 90 per cent over a few decades, with climate change, fewer flowers, pesticides, and disease cited as the primary drivers.

With bees having to travel farther distances to forage, evidence shows they will also produce less honey. Decreasing floral abundance is a major driver of increased foraging distances.

As the flowering window compresses, as nectar volumes fall and as floral diversity declines under harsh climate, the honey is not honey anymore. It is the thinner, simpler and chemically impoverished version of what it once was. This time, not because of the bees, but the flowers.