I am a beekeeper. Yup, I wear the funny suit and hat. My father grew up on a farm in Idaho and they needed bees to pollinate their crops. Today we don’t have a 5,000 acre farm to pollinate but we still have the apiary. I love going out and harvesting the honey in the fall. A lot of people think that you just go up to the hive, place a bucket under it, and let the honey drain out. But it is more complicated than that. There is special equipment to help with this extraction; my dad calls thes
e the “hive tools”. One such tool is the smoker. Bees aren’t willing to give away what they have worked all summer to make and will usually put up a fight; that is why the smoker is used because when bees smell smoke they calm down. Other hive tools are needed because bees build special compartments (honey comb) to keep their honey protected. Enable for us to get to the honey the “cappings” (cover of wax) have to come off. We do this with a hot knife. Another problem with extraction is how to get the honey out of the comb. Natural honey is a thick substance, and won’t spin out easily. To help speed up the process the temperature must be kept at 110 degrees. That gets really hot when you’re sitting there and hand cranking only two frames at a time. Let me just say it was a grand day when we finally purchased an electric spinn
er. My favorite thing to do during harvest time is to cut off a bit of comb, suck out the honey, and chew on the wax. Beekeeping is a lot of hard work and takes a lot of time but the reward is sweet.
I am a beekeeper. Yup, I wear the funny suit and hat. My father grew up on a farm in Idaho and they needed bees to pollinate their crops. Today we don’t have a 5,000 acre farm to pollinate but we still have the apiary. I love going out and harvesting the honey in the fall. A lot of people think that you just go up to the hive, place a bucket under it, and let the honey drain out. But it is more complicated than that. There is special equipment to help with this extraction; my dad calls thes
e the “hive tools”. One such tool is the smoker. Bees aren’t willing to give away what they have worked all summer to make and will usually put up a fight; that is why the smoker is used because when bees smell smoke they calm down. Other hive tools are needed because bees build special compartments (honey comb) to keep their honey protected. Enable for us to get to the honey the “cappings” (cover of wax) have to come off. We do this with a hot knife. Another problem with extraction is how to get the honey out of the comb. Natural honey is a thick substance, and won’t spin out easily. To help speed up the process the temperature must be kept at 110 degrees. That gets really hot when you’re sitting there and hand cranking only two frames at a time. Let me just say it was a grand day when we finally purchased an electric spinn
er. My favorite thing to do during harvest time is to cut off a bit of comb, suck out the honey, and chew on the wax. Beekeeping is a lot of hard work and takes a lot of time but the reward is sweet.
No bees means no flowers, no crops, no animals, no us. Where have all the bees gone? Some folks think that maybe radio waves throw off their paths. True? Or maybe it's connected to global warming? Maybe the bees just got tired of doing what they've been doings since they pollinated the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I can't be sure, but you could look into it.
ReplyDeleteCCD stands for Colony Collapse disorder. This means that the bees are dieing off. I don't know the exact percentages of the food that we eat today that is there because of the pollination of bees but I know that it is a lot. As a beekeeper I know that there are less and less bees. We even have to send our bees to California during the winter months because there just aren't enough bees around.
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