Short answerMostly falseEstablished evidence
No, though it is closer than 'no' alone suggests. Nectar is carried in the honey stomach — a storage crop that is part of the transport system, not the digestive one — and passed mouth to mouth between bees. Nothing is digested and nothing comes back from the gut. Calling it vomit describes the direction of travel and gets the organ wrong.
It travels well because it is nearly right. The nectar does come back out through the mouth, and 'bee vomit' is a much easier thing to say than 'the contents of a specialised storage crop transferred by trophallaxis'. It also does the job most food facts of this shape are doing, which is to be repeatable at a table rather than to be accurate.
A forager sucks nectar up through her proboscis and it goes into the honey stomach, also called the crop. This is a thin-walled expandable sac on the transport route between mouth and gut. It is a container, and while nectar is in it the bee is essentially a flying flask.
Behind it sits a valve, the proventriculus, and behind that the midgut — where the bee's own digestion happens. The valve is the whole point of the arrangement: it lets the bee take a little of her cargo through for her own use while keeping the rest of the load out of her digestive system entirely. Nectar destined for the comb never crosses it.
The interesting part is that the nectar is not merely being carried. Glandular secretions are added to it in the crop and again at each transfer, and the most consequential is invertase, which splits sucrose into glucose and fructose. So the load is being chemically changed on the journey and during the handovers.
That is the substantive reason the vomit framing misleads. Vomiting is the reversal of digestion — material coming back from a gut that had begun working on it. What happens here is the opposite in every respect that matters: a load kept deliberately out of the digestive system, altered by secretions added to it on purpose, and handed on to another animal that will do the same thing again.
Widely repeated and not supported by current evidence. Listed so the correction is here rather than only the claim.
Widely repeated, and wrong on the anatomy. Nectar is held in the honey stomach — a storage crop on the foregut, separated from the midgut by the proventriculus — and transferred mouth to mouth without entering the digestive tract. Vomiting is the reversal of digestion; this is the unloading of a cargo that was deliberately kept out of it. Recorded here because a reader will meet the claim, not because this site holds it.
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