It's Nearly Honey Harvest Time
What an incredible summer we’ve had so far with plenty of lovely sunshine – although I’m sure we can all agree that some rain wouldn’t go astray…
The bees thrive in these lovely, hot, sunny conditions as they’re perfect for foraging for nectar to then turn into honey. However, if the dry continues they’ll start to struggle to find flowers to forage on, so here’s hoping we get some reprieve soon.
The sole purpose of bees making honey, is to survive through winter when it’s too cold to leave the hive and forage for nectar and flowers are few and far between. Due to the high moisture content in nectar, it only lasts a couple of months before fermenting, so the worker bees turn it into honey to preserve it. Fortunately for us, they often produce more than they can consume, so we’re treated to any surplus.
Bees make honey by firstly collecting nectar. When a forager bee finds a good source of nectar (often from Clover flowers here in the Maniototo), she uses her proboscis (tongue) to reach the centre of the flower to collect it. The nectar, along with some of her saliva is stored in her ‘honey stomach’. When her stomach is full, she returns to the hive to empty it.
Once back at the hive, forager bees pass (or more precisely regurgitate) the nectar to waiting house bees and from there they chew it and pass it around other house bees. As the nectar is chewed and passed from bee to bee, enzymes change its pH and other chemical properties. At this stage, the nectar and enzyme mixture contain too much water to be stored over the winter so the bees then set to work on drying it out.
They use two different methods for doing this. Firstly, they put a little bit of honey in each cell instead of filling up one cell at a time, which increases the surface area for increased water evaporation. They also 'fan' their wings over the honey to increase airflow and evaporate even more water.
Once they’ve reduced the water content in the honey, it’s time to seal it with beeswax – this preserves the honey until the bees are ready to eat it over winter, or we harvest and extract the surplus.
Interestingly, honey is one of the only foods that never goes off. Ceramic jars containing the world’s oldest honey – about 5,500 years old (as far as archaeologists have found), were discovered in perfect edible condition in a tomb in Georgia.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to check on our hives to ensure they’re healthy, strong and have enough honey supers (the boxes above the queen excluder) so they have plenty of room to store honey. It’s a lovely time of year to be out with the bees and soon we’ll be at the exciting stage harvesting.
