Different honeys

This is the most frequently asked question of all beekeepers!

Here is then, some of the answer, without the hard words.

Some flowers produce nectar, which seems to have no other function than to attract insects, which accidentally collect pollen on their body hairs. When the insects go to other flowers they accidentally transfer the pollen to that flower's receptive organ, the pollen fertilises the ova to make seeds.

Other flowers, mainly grasses and some trees, don't make nectar, they rely on the wind to blow their very light pollen to receptive female flowers. These are the pollens which cause hay fever. The pollen grains are very small and light. Insect pollinated plant pollen grains are large and slightly sticky and don't fly in the wind.

In this case we're talking about honeybees, not just any old insect, although some other insects can play a part in pollination. Honey bees will also collect just pollen deliberately, take it back to the nest where it is stored ready to be fed to the larvae, who are growing so quickly that they need the protein of which the pollen is formed.

Honey bees also collect and store nectar. That's the carbohydrate - energy - food for adult bees (a little is also fed to larvae but they need protein more). They store it in large amounts while ever the weather is warm enough to allow flowers to produce nectar. When the weather is cold or it's raining and the bees can't fly or if it's so hot and dry that the flowers don't produce nectar the bees have stored reserves to live on.

Other insects collect different types of carbohydrate and protein and don't store either for any length of time. Honeybee stores, if they're not used, can last for years, so one generation of bees (the workers live on average about six weeks) are storing food for future generations. In that way they' re capitalists. In other ways they're socialists but that's a different matter. Honeybees are unique in this way of life.

Honeybees will collect honey while nectar is being produced and they usually collect more than they need to see them through hard times, it's this surplus which the beekeeper takes. If the bees don't collect enough nectar for their needs the beekeeper will feed them sugar syrup so that they don't starve.

All nectar comprises sugar (about 20%) and water (about 80%). The sugars are different kinds. There are other elements of nectar, which differ between plant types; this is why different floral sources of honey produce different colours and flavours. Ling heather honey has about 3% of protein in it which makes it thixotropic, uniquely to northern European honeys, but manuka honey from the Antipodes has a similar property.

This is all relevant, promise.

At 80% water, nectar will ferment. The honeybee worker 'sucks' up the nectar with her tongue, it's more of a pumping action. The tongue is in five parts, which move against each other to transfer the nectar to a simple internal organ, which stores the nectar until she returns to the nest. Once there she dumps the nectar into a cell in the comb. That can be any cell, as long as it doesn't contain pollen or brood.

Another bee comes along and 'sucks' up some of the nectar and spreads the parts of her tongue to form a film of nectar. A bit like making bubbles in the bath. At the same time other bees are standing around the hive and especially near the entrance, fanning their wings. In this way warm, moisture-laden air - the moisture has evaporated from the exposed nectar - is expelled from the hive and cool, drier air is drawn in.

This process of taking out the nectar, exposing it to the air and putting it back in cells continues until by some unknown process the bees are satisfied that its moisture content has been reduced to about 20% of the original nectar. We call that honey. The cells with the evaporated high sugar concentrated contents are sealed with a cap of beeswax (another fascinating subject, don't get me started) so that it's waterproof. Honey is hygroscopic, if it is left open to the air it will eventually absorb water and ferment. With its sealing cap of wax it's impervious to moisture unless it's damaged. The bees will chomp through the capping when they need the honey.

Back to the different sugar components in nectar - now honey. They are complex but are, simply, glucose and sucrose, dextrose and laevulose. If the proportion of dextrose is more than that of laevulose, which is normal in most honeys, the honey will granulate. The exception is acacia honey, true acacia honey, with no contamination from other honeys, will stay clear all the time.

Some honeys have very large percentages of dextrose, they granulate very quickly. Oilseed rape honey will granulate in the comb in the hive in a matter of days. It's very important for the beekeeper to extract those combs as soon as the cells are sealed if s/he wants to be able to extract the liquid honey easily.

Such honeys grow crystals very quickly. Because they grow quickly they are tiny - the next-door crystals are growing quickly too and there's no room for them to grow large. The result is a very smooth honey.

Honeys with a lower proportion of dextrose grow crystals more slowly, those with the lowest amount of dextrose grow so very slowly that there's time for the crystals to grow very large - like gravel in some cases.

Most honeys need foci to start crystals growing, these can be tiny air bubbles, microscopic bits of dust or other particles or other crystals which are introduced by the beekeeper. This last is called 'seeding'. Ideally an amount of very finely granulated honey - such as oil seed rape honey which although set and probably very hard is also very smooth, like butter - is introduced into the honey to be granulated or 'set'. It is stirred in until finely distributed and then left. The crystals which grow will take on the character of the seed, that is they will be very small and produce a soft set, smooth honey. That's the ideal.

If the beekeeper doesn't have any such seeding material and wants to have some controlled set honey s/he can agitate the newly extracted honey. This isn't done, as someone once suggested, by jumping out at a jar and making a face at it but by physically moving the honey. There are various ways but a few years ago an innovative chap developed a large spiral screw, a bit like the best corkscrews, with a long stem which fitted into a drill chuck. This is where I came in on the ng. A low speed turning of the screw in a tank of honey would start granulation in about ten minutes in about 60 lbs of run honey. The honey would then be run off, while still soft enough into plastic, lidded storage buckets or jars.

This process explains why 'run' honey bought in jars or squeezy plastic bears granulates after being used a few times. The frequent insertion of a knife or spoon into a jar, or the squeezing of the soft bottle, means that the contained honey is agitated and eventually will granulate.

Any granulated honey can be restored to run honey by warming the jar gently in a pan of hot water to re-dissolve the crystals. Conversely, to prevent granulation in stored honey it can be put in the deep freeze, this slows down the growth of crystals.

If the beekeeper is tardy in extracting the honey from the comb for any reason s/he has to melt the whole lot in a warm oven in a suitable container until it's all liquid, let the lot cool and lift off the cake of wax from the top.

The business of extracting honey hasn't changed except in detail for about

150 years, since the movable frame hive (the 'modern' wooden box) was developed. Before that time comb had to be cut from the insides of hives made from various materials, broken and filtered through fine cloth.

Now the sealed honeycomb is built by the bees in wooden frames which hang in the hive and can be removed. The 'cappings' are removed with a knife and saved to be melted and filtered. The honey-dripping frames are dropped vertically into the purpose-built slots inside a drum. The slots are attached to a central pivot which, when turned by a hand or electrically powered cranked and usually geared device, throws out drops of honey towards the internal walls of the drum. They collect at the bottom and are drawn off from time to time by a 'honey gate' - a sort of tap - on the outside.

By the way, the bees are encouraged to build comb in the frames by the beekeeper, who fits a sheet of embossed beeswax into the wooden frame. S/he does this not because the bees need it, they've been building perfect comb for 300,000,000 years without our help (Man has been around for about

500,000 years) but so that we can move combs around within and between hives. We want to be in control of insects!

Now I'm sure that I've forgotten some things and that others haven't been explained well enough. If you have any questions about this or any other aspect of honeybees, honey or wax, please say so.

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher
Loading thread data ...

Thanks Mary, that's great! I've always fancied keeping bees, now I feel I know loads more about the subject.

Reply to
Grunff

You need to know far, far more ... that was just SOME of the stuff about honey. But thanks anyway. If you really do want to think about keeping bees get in touch with me, I probably know people who'll be able to help you get started. You shouldn't jump in without lots of consideration.

And if you're anywhere within striking distance, go to the National Agriculture Centre (the Royal Agricultural Showground) on 24 April, at Stoneleigh in Warwickshire. That's when the British Beekeepers' Spring Convention is held and everyone who is anyone will be there. It's a huge trade show with lectures. I'll be there with the biggest bee book stand in the world [it's not mine :-) ] and would love to meet anyone from here. Even non-beekeepers have a gret time.

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

Agreed. Excellent indeed.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

Reply to
Andy Hall

No questions?

:-(

That means you know it all :-)

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

It is definitely something I'd like to do, but probably in 5 years' time or so. We still have huge amounts of work to do on the house, stables, garage, fields etc before we have time for proper hobbies. Wine making is another on my list. As is building another trike.

Reply to
Grunff

Oh, beekeeping isn't a hobby. It's a terminal disease.

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

? Do go on...

Reply to
Grunff

I'm off to bed. I'll explain later :-)

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

Never. Thanks very much for this. I'll read through it some more and I am sure that there will be more questions.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

Reply to
Andy Hall

Haven't read all that, which was interesting... The uses you can put the product to are limited aren't they? Making mead with it being the most useful one...

Reply to
BillV

Not forgetting the hours of endless fun to be had when they, for example, swarm and take up residence in next door's chimney - as happened to someone I know in another NG last year

Reply to
geoff

Mary Fisher wrote

snip excellent fascinating article

I have a question Mary

I once had a girlfriend whose dad was a beekeeper and he used to let me help him tend the hives sometimes. I don't remember much about it now, except that it was my job to puff the smoke generator thingy, and it seemed to me that the bees in one of the hives were much more aggressive and became angry sooner than the others. I will always remember my trepidation when we approached this particular hive and removed the lid. Was this my imagination or do different hives really have different "temperaments" (if that's the right word)?

Peter

Reply to
Peter Taylor

Me too ...

So, a friend runs his own tomato nursery and buys in boxes of bees to pollinate the plants?

My brother I L used to have a tomato nursery and never did this (summat about self pollination or spraying them with water or summat?)

Are there different breeds of tomato that require different processes?

All the best ..

T i m

p.s. My bee a phobic daughter spent an hour in the green house with me the other day whist I was wiring up some new extension phones for him ... I think she'd forgotten she shared the place with over 100 bees by the end .. ;-)

Reply to
T i m

Swarming can be prevented and in 25 years I've only been called to one in a chimney. It wasn't a swarm from our hives. And retrieving it was challenging and memorable, quite a lot of fun really. In fact swarm stories are legion, deserve a ng of their own!

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

No.

That's not particularly useful, it can be enjoyable and you seem to be thinking that honey is the only product of the hive.

Mary.

Reply to
Mary Fisher

They do seem to. Some beekeepers say that it can be a function of the 'strain' of the bee. I don't know if properly controlled studies have been done on this aspect, it's very difficult to guarantee identical genetic inheritance.

Some beekeepers say that it's a function of weather. I'd agree with this in that if the weather isn't good for nectar production the bees are definitely tetchy. My mentor used to say that women at home with nothing to do are to be treated with respect ...

The queen has a very complex funtion in the hive, if there is a problem with the queen - not laying well, getting old and not producing the chemical which maintains colony cohesion* the bees are very 'defensive' (I'd rather not use the term 'aggressive', they don't go looking for trouble but react to outside stimulants). If a queen is removed from a colony the bees are disoriented and defensive within a few minutes.

There are other things which can go wrong inside the, again, very complex social structure of the colony and can make it display this defense symptom. There are external factors too, some chemicals (such as agricultural sprays), while not necessarily killing the bees, disquiet the colony.

Bees, like many insects, respond defensively to vibrations. If the beekeeper is clumsy and bangs the hive the bees will often respond. Some beekeepers think that this is the very way to manage their colonies, that you hve to show them who's master. I suspect they're the ones who beat their dogs into submission ...

I've had the experience of a tetchy colony in our apiary, an apparently similar colony to all the others, has gone into defensive mode. Sometimes it's temporary, at other times the only way to deal with it, short of destroying the colony which no-one likes to do is to re-queen, that can have a dramatic effect.

But to re-queen you have to go into the colony, disturb it even more and find the old queen - one insect in, say, 50,000. To do that when you're frightened and they don't want you in there is daunting ...

Another thing my mentor used to say is that "bees do nothing invariably". Many beekeepers don't believe this, they think they know all about their charges. They're wrong, no-one knows everything despite more research having been done over centuries on bees than any other animal except Man. That's one of the fascinations I suppose, we can never be in absolute control of honeybees.

This won't have helped you at all, sorry! There's no one answer to your question and from this distance in time and space I couldn't even begin to suggest a reason.

Mary

  • the beekeeping world is unimaginative in its Naming of Parts. The chemical which the queen exudes from her skin is licked off and transferred orally round every bee in the hive and is absolutely essential to maintaining a 'happy family'. I think its chemical name is something like di-hydro-methyl-oxy-furfuraldehyde but I might have got a bit of it wrong. It doesn't really matter, few know it as that. Its official name is 'queen substance'.

Reply to
Mary Fisher

Those are bumble bees, not honey bees. Honey bees don't thrive in glass houses, it has been tried but you need very small colonies and they can't collect enough pollen (and even less nectar) to maintain their population.

I rely on self pollination for my tomatoes too because a) I only have a few plants and b) I'm too idle to go round doing mucky things with camel hair paintbrushes or even spraying or shaking.

There's no doubt though that in big commercial situations insect pollination is more efficient than other methods. You get heavier yields and perfect fruit rather than some mis-shapen ones. It's also expensive - swings and roundabouts. Saves on labour though ...

I don't know. I don't think so.

Bumble bees are delightful, they're like flying teddy bears and there's no reason to be frightened of them. Even honey bees and wasps aren't the devils they're often assumed to be but they are more defensive than bumble bees.

When a bumble bee feels threatened it leans over and raises its middle leg as if to say please don't hurt me ... they very, very rarely sting. We've moved bumble bee nests in our hands and often pick up chilled bumble bees, blow on them gently in our cupped hands and give them a little drop of sugar water so that they have the energy to return to their nests. I've never been stung by a bumble bee. If you ARE stung by a bumble bee you really deserve it. Try to get your daughter to watch them and see how beautiful and gentle they are.

They also have an audible warning of approach, from now on the air could be filled with the sound of entomological motor bikes - if, sadly, the bumble bee population wasn't verging on extinction by loss of habitat and, I'm sorry to say, ignorance.

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

Maybe we should start a "Honey, not for us", thread to provide some balance for the "any old insects" you harshly discount?

I mean, what about the bee's less 'goody goody' brother, the wasp? They provide endless entertainment for folk indoors with rulers and rolled up newspapers as they bat them into each others faces and aren't fussy about their homes like your bees. In fact they can be easily caught by making a 'wasp trap' consisting of a net curtian and a window.

They also do a great job of keeping tramps out of the bins and (for me anyway) great entertainment watching kids loose their ice creams as they try to run away from them ;-)

"Not just any old insect" indeed ...!

Yours buzzingly .. ;-)

T i m

Reply to
T i m

I'm sorry if it came across as harsh, it wasn't intended to be so. I'm fascinated by all insects, I just happen to know more about social ones than others. There are far, far, more of those others than social ones.

If you mean the social wasps - the yellow and black striped ones - they are wonderful creatures, more intelligent and evolutionary advanced than any kind of bee. They also have a fascinating natural history, do a huge amount of good (in human terms) than many other insects and there's no reason for them to be persecuted.

Incidentally, the 'brother' wasps can't sting they don't have the equipment, I think you're worried about the females. The workers :-)

It's a delight to have a wasp nest at eye level where I can watch it and show it to the children. On the rare occasion I've not been able to persuade someone to keep a wasps' nest I've brought it home, put it in the deep freeze to kill the inhabitants humanely and later carefully cut it apart to show the wonderful structure to people.

Mary

Reply to
Mary Fisher

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.