How it's made
Honey making is a wonderfully natural process that is dictated by nature – man has very little to do with the timeline and how the honey is produced until it’s time to harvest. Honey is a natural product made by an amazing and complex system that tiny insects oversee. Let’s take a look at how it comes to “bee”.
Worker bees harvest the nectar
Honey is produced when bees harvest nectar from the flowers. Bees suck out the nectar in a flower with their long, tube-like tongues. They carry the honey in their honey stomach, which is separate from their regular stomach. When the bee returns to the hive, the other workers suck the honey from the bee - the bees digestive enzymes break down the complex sugars into simple sugars. From there, an evaporation process that must take place to ultimately turn nectar, which is 80 per cent water, into honey, which is 17 or 18 per cent moisture.
And worker humans harvest the honey from the bees
Work on the honey farm begins in the early spring and spans all the way to mid or late October. In the spring, the workers of Glory Bee are unwrapping their hives from winter, building up populations and treating to prevent disease. Once the honey flow is on, it's time to extract the honey from the hive.
During this time, Glory Bee staff visit every single yard and add honey supers on to the brood boxes (brood boxes are the bottom two boxes, where the queen lives and lays her eggs). Honey supers can be piled as many as 10 high. After all the bee yards have honey supers, the crew goes around and pulls the supers full of honey for extraction. They load it on a truck and transport it back to the honey house.
At the honey house, the supers are loaded into hot rooms, which make the honey warm and runny, so it can be easily extracted, and further help with the dehydration process. After a night in the hot room, the supers are taken out by the honey house crew - the capping on the comb is scratched and put through an extractor (a big cylindrical machine), which spins out the honey. The honey is then pumped into large holding tanks and then barreled to be sold on the global market or drained into pails for local sales. Once the harvest is over, staff prepare the hives for winter and end the season by wrapping all the hives in insulated tarps so they are protected during the long, cold winter.
Sounds like a sticky situation, doesn't it?
Worker bees harvest the nectar
Honey is produced when bees harvest nectar from the flowers. Bees suck out the nectar in a flower with their long, tube-like tongues. They carry the honey in their honey stomach, which is separate from their regular stomach. When the bee returns to the hive, the other workers suck the honey from the bee - the bees digestive enzymes break down the complex sugars into simple sugars. From there, an evaporation process that must take place to ultimately turn nectar, which is 80 per cent water, into honey, which is 17 or 18 per cent moisture.
And worker humans harvest the honey from the bees
Work on the honey farm begins in the early spring and spans all the way to mid or late October. In the spring, the workers of Glory Bee are unwrapping their hives from winter, building up populations and treating to prevent disease. Once the honey flow is on, it's time to extract the honey from the hive.
During this time, Glory Bee staff visit every single yard and add honey supers on to the brood boxes (brood boxes are the bottom two boxes, where the queen lives and lays her eggs). Honey supers can be piled as many as 10 high. After all the bee yards have honey supers, the crew goes around and pulls the supers full of honey for extraction. They load it on a truck and transport it back to the honey house.
At the honey house, the supers are loaded into hot rooms, which make the honey warm and runny, so it can be easily extracted, and further help with the dehydration process. After a night in the hot room, the supers are taken out by the honey house crew - the capping on the comb is scratched and put through an extractor (a big cylindrical machine), which spins out the honey. The honey is then pumped into large holding tanks and then barreled to be sold on the global market or drained into pails for local sales. Once the harvest is over, staff prepare the hives for winter and end the season by wrapping all the hives in insulated tarps so they are protected during the long, cold winter.
Sounds like a sticky situation, doesn't it?