Time and change will surely show the start of spring through blooming flowers. Before long, honeybees will start to buzz around, pollinating flowers and making honey.
Out of over 5,000 varieties of bees worldwide, only seven live in Southeast Asia. Bees native to the United States do not produce edible honey, so the honeybees currently used by farmers were imported.
“The honeybee we have here was imported by European settlers,” said Reed Johnson, professor and entomology graduate studies chair at The Ohio State University. “It is unique in that they make honey you can harvest.”
Honeybees play a key role in food production due to their ability to pollinate flowers, enabling plants to grow.
Pollination
“Honeybees are nature’s pollinator,” said Arlen Ramey, an Ohio apiarist for 16 years who currently manages three hives of his own. “A lot of the nation’s harvest [are] vegetables [and] nuts, and anything that grows from a plant needs to be pollinated.”
Pollination is the act of spreading pollen from one flower to another. Once the flower is pollinated, fertilization occurs. Ultimately, pollination increases the plant’s yield.
“Flowers are basically a plant’s way of saying it’s mating season,” Ramey said. “That’s when the bees start making honey.”
The honeybees collect pollen and nectar, a sugary liquid produced by the flower. As they fly, some of the pollen falls off the bees and spreads, helping to pollinate other flowers. Then, with the nectar the honeybees have collected, they return to their hive and make honey.
Honey Making Process
“I call it bee spit,” Ramey said. “The bees mix the nectar with their own secretion and start making the honey.”
Johnson said the honey we know of is made by a distinct process. There are specific steps that honeybees carry out during the process.
“The bees make honey by mostly dehydrating the nectar by drying it down with their wings,” Johnson said. “This helps to preserve the honey along with the enzymes they add to it.”
The honeybees proceed to make honey until the current flowering season is over. There are two main honey harvesting times – late spring and early fall. The season is over when flowers are no longer in bloom and there is no other pollen to collect.
Harvesting time is entirely dependent on what is grown in an area. Johnson said that since plants flower on different schedules, beekeepers know it is time to harvest their honey when the current flowering season has ended.
Ramey said the main source of nectar dries up by mid-to-late July. This means the honey that honeybees have made during flowering season is what they must utilize for the rest of the year.
Whenever honey making season is over, the bees will begin to eat the honey they made. This is because the honey itself is the main source of food honeybees have to survive the winter. For this reason, “the honey quality is going to go down starting right there,” Ramey said.
Gathering Frames
Frames, which are individual structural pieces of the hive, are filled with honeycomb. Honeycomb is a series of wax-based hexagonal cells, which honeybees then fill with honey to store for later use.
Harvest time impacts the quality of honey, so it is up to the beekeepers to decide when to harvest. The harvesting processes presents a challenge for farmers, as the frames must be manually removed to collect the honey.
“It’s one of the more invasive things you do in a hive, and that is because you are literally stealing their frames,” Ramey said.
To begin the harvesting process, a beekeeper will dress head-to-toe in a protective suit to prevent getting stung. A beekeeper then may utilize a variety of tools to separate most of the bees from the boxes.
The most common tools a beekeeper may use to separate the bees are a leaf blower, a bee brush to brush the bees off or an escape board.
“An escape board is like a one-way valve that the bees can get out but not back into the box,” Johnson said.
There are usually a couple of honeybees still in the bee box, and the bees outside are aggressive and defensive toward the beekeeper. Smoke is administered which tricks the bees into thinking there is a fire. There are two ways the honeybees are impacted by the smoke.
Inside the box, the honeybees immediately begin gorging on their honey because they correlate the smoke with a fire and need the energy in preparation for evacuation. This causes them to become lethargic, slowing their response time preventing them from bothering the beekeeper.
Bees communicate through pheromones, which are chemical signals. For the bees outside the hive, the smoke masks their pheromones preventing the honeybee’s from engaging in defensive behavior, and they flee from the beekeeper, which prevents stinging behavior.
Once the bees are calmed down and out of the way, beekeepers pull frames from the beehive box. Beekeepers look for the bee frame to be 90% or more full of capped honey.
“Capped honey is honey that has a little wax cap on it that prevents the honey from draining all over the place,” Ramey said.
The beekeeper will then take as many frames as they need and leave enough frames for the bees to have food to get through the winter.
Every beekeeper has their own way of obtaining frames to collect honey. Ramey said his method is to take frames out of the box, brush the bees off and quickly place the frames into a rubber tote. Then he reassembles the box.
Harvesting Honey
For the next step in the honey harvesting process, Johnson said it is best to heat up the honey so it will flow easily out of the cells. Once the honey is warmed up, the wax caps need to be removed.
“You could remove the wax caps with a capping scratcher which is kind of like a metal comb,” Johnson said. “Or a better way to do that is with a hot knife that will melt the wax and take off the cappings.”
Ramey said he uses a capping scratcher to remove the wax caps. Then, he places two frames at a time into a centrifugal extractor.
“It’s like a big stainless-steel tub with a geared frame spinner inside it,” Ramey said. “You crank a handle once and it spins twice, so you get it cranking really fast.”
There are an assortment of centrifugal extractors available to farmers, with different types of spinners and containers of varying sizes.
Ramey’s honey extractor is big enough to hold two of the ten-by-six frames at a time. This fast-spinning centrifuge flings the honey out of the frame, allowing it to drain toward the bottom of the extractor.
The honey is drained out of the extractor and filtered through a coarse screen. Then, a fine screen is added to catch any wax pieces or bee parts that made it into the honey.
“There’s no preservatives or anything that goes into the honey,” Ramey said.
Once the honey is filtered, it goes right into jars and is ready to be consumed. The term ‘busy bee’ is no exaggeration when it comes to honeybee species, who combine instinct, teamwork and precision to create a product consumers around the world love.