Bees do not make honey for us. They make it to get through winter, when nothing flowers and the colony must eat for months without leaving the hive. Everything else follows from that.
From nectar to honey
A forager draws nectar from a flower and stores it in her crop, a pouch sitting before the stomach. On the flight home, enzymes already begin splitting the sucrose in the nectar into glucose and fructose.
At the hive she passes her load to a receiver bee, who takes it, works it, and moves it back and forth between her mouthparts many times. Water evaporates at every pass. Nectar holds 70 to 80 % of it, finished honey less than 18 %.
That drying is what makes honey almost imperishable. Below 18 % water, no yeast develops. It also explains why a honey left too moist ferments and turns sour.
Once the water content is right, the bees seal the cell with a wax capping. That is the signal the honey is ripe, and the beekeeper harvests only capped frames. You see the whole job at once in a Honeycomb Honey (100 dh), which you eat as it comes, wax included.
How much a hive produces
The honest answer: it depends on everything, and mostly on rain. In France or Spain, a hive gives between 15 and 30 kg a year in a good region. In Morocco, across the arid south, count on 5 to 15 kg, and far less in dry years.
A colony feeds itself first. It produces around 60 kg of honey over the year, eats most of it, and the beekeeper takes only the surplus. A harvest that left the hive empty would kill it before spring.
That is what explains the price of a honey like Cactus Honey (150 dh). Euphorbia flowers briefly, on ground that is hard to reach, and a year without rain halves the crop. The price follows no fashion, it follows the weather.
Filtering, or not
After extraction, honey holds bits of wax, sometimes a bee, fragments of propolis. A coarse filtering through cloth or a wide sieve removes them without taking anything else.
Industrial filtering goes much further. It heats the honey to make it runny, pushes it under pressure through very fine filters, and strips out almost all the pollen along the way. The result stays liquid on the shelf for months and never crystallises. It has also lost what allowed anyone to trace its floral origin.
An artisanal honey clouds over time, settles at the bottom of the jar, crystallises in winter. Those three signs bother the eye and reassure the person who knows.