Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 8
From Hive to Home: Making and Harvesting Honey
The honey-making process inside the hive is a perfectly orchestrated symphony of
events. And it is because honeybees hoard their honey and other resources that beekeep-
ers are rewarded with excess honey.
The worker bee begins foraging for nectar in the first three to four weeks of her life.
Shegathersupnectarbyvisitingflowerswithintwotothreemilesofthehive.Shesucks
up the nectar from many flowers with her long, tubelike tongue, or proboscis, and then
stores it in her special honey-sac stomach. This stomach is separate from her digestive
stomach and holds up to 70 mg of nectar, almost as much as she weighs. A honeybee
must visit fifteen hundred flowers to gather enough nectar to fill up her honey stomach.
She then carries the nectar back to the hive and turns it over to the
house bees
.
A younger house bee accepts the nectar from the foraging bee by sucking it out of
her honey sac through her mouth. These house bees mix the nectar with their own en-
zyme, called
invertase
, which breaks down the sugary nectar, or sucrose, into glucose
and fructose, making it possible for the bees to digest. The nectar is then placed in the
honeycomb cells. Worker bees inside the hive fan the liquid nectar with their wings,
which helps to evaporate the extra moisture and bring the water content of the nectar
down to 18 percent. This process ripens the nectar into honey. Honey harvested before
it is ripened, with a moisture content higher than 18 percent, can cause the naturally oc-
curring yeast cells in honey to ferment. Fermented honey tastes a bit like vinegar and is
exceedingly runny. Somehow the bees instinctively know when the nectar is at the cor-
rect moisture content and the cells containing it are ready to be capped with beeswax.
Oncethebeeshavefilledallthecellswithinaframewithhoney,theycoverthecellswith
pure-beeswax cappings, creating what I call the beautiful stained-glass-window effect.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search