I'm creating a cold-climate fantasy world and would like to replace all (or most) inspects with bats. Bats would come as small as bees, all the way up to ride-able size. Big ones eat smaller ones, etc.
Fantasy world, so it doesn't have to make 100% sense, but I'd like the concepts and interactions to be grounded in science. How would bats serve as pollinators, could they produce honey?
Being pollinator and producing honey are two independent features.
Bats are already pollinators in real world
Bats are very important pollinators in tropical and desert climates. Most flower-visiting bats are found in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands.
Two species of nectar-feeding bats, the lesser long-nosed bat and the Mexican long-tongued bat, migrate north a thousand miles or more every spring from Mexico into Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.
Producing honey instead is done by certain insects to feed their little ones, and it is done by eating and then regurgitating the nectar produced by the flowers.
Since bats are mammals they would feed their young ones with milk and then they would proceed directly to eat their main food, so producing honey for a mammal has little sense. Also producing honey as energy storage for harsh times has little sense, since fat tissues are better suited for this and follow the bearer more conveniently.
No, that's not a typo. If your bats engaged in sophisticated eusocial activities, like naked mole rats, then it's possible for them to produce a partly digested, regurgitated foodstuff that might have antibacterial enzymes, or have bacteria contained that culture the foodstuff. Naked mole rats produce fatty acids from otherwise indigestible cellulose in their guts using symbiotic bacteria, and I could see bats feeding on various foodstuffs, vomiting it into a communal collection (with the symbiotic bacteria) and letting the whole thing ferment like cheese analogs to convert cellulose into some kind of more digestible form (fats or proteins) that would then be used to feed the young and queen.
ProjectApex and L Dutch are both right that bats are all ready involved with pollination, so this is a perfectly sensible extension of bat behavior. But I doubt that if your pollinator bats were drinking nectar that THAT would be the source of "honey." In fact, the honey-analog would most likely resemble a soft cheese like feta. At most, they might regurgitate nectar to stimulate bacterial growth. Sorry, sweet is unlikely.
