Bibliography

• herstat.com
• www.orkin.com
• honeybee.org.au

How Honey gets to Shops

The last thing I need to tell you is how our precious honey gets from our hive to your local supermarket. Obviously I will be focusing on bees that live on farms.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/Texas_State_Fair_honey.jpg

When bees fill all the honeycomb cells with nectar, they cover and seal it with a wax cap. Once all the combs are capped, the bee-keeper can collect the honey. In order not to be stung, the bee-keeper wears protective clothes. Next when the combs are clear of bees, he takes what is called the supers out of the hive and removes them to a workroom. Here the wax cappings are scraped off with a hot sharp knife and the combs are placed in an extractor. This machine whirls the uncapped combs round and round, and flings the honey out of the wax. The honey then runs off into a pail below. Little or no damage is done to the delicate honeycomb by this process. The clean combs are then returned to the hive for the bees to fill up with honey again. The extracted honey is strained and allowed to stand for a few hours to let the air bubbles rise to the top and escape. It is then poured into jars. Some of it is allowed to granulate, crystallize or become hard and some is left runny and clear. Nearly all honey granulates sooner or later, because the glucose in it separates into crystals, thickening and becoming lighter in colour.

You may have noticed in your local supermarket how many colours honey comes in. Its colour depends on the kind of flower from which it comes from. For the same reason honey tastes different to.

From Flower to Hive

The next thing you need to know is how honey is actually made. I will explain exactly how it is done in this post. enjoy!

Honey is made from nectar. Nectar is a sweet liquid made up of sugars and is found in the nectaries, or honey-bearing parts of flowers. It is the worker bees' job to collect the nectar. When they get to the flowers, they suck the nectar up from the nectaries and store it in their honey sacs. When their honey sacs are full,  they return to the hive. The nectar is then stored in the comb cells. Initially the nectar has a high water content. In order for the nectar to change to honey, the water content must reduce from 70% to 20%. This takes time but the bees aid the process by fanning their wings to help the water evaporate. The temperature of the hive also helps the water to evaporate because it is 33'C. When the bees consider the nectar solution to be ready, they cover and seal it with a wax cap. Once all the combs are capped, the beekeeper ( if there is one) can collect the honey.
Some of my families favourite flowers are heather and white clover because of their high nectar content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6E0yB0Ev0o

My Home - The Hive



How hives are Built:

Hello again! I hope you learnt something new from my last post. Today I am going to share with you how my family and I make our home. Our hive is something we are very proud of and we work very hard to perfect it to ensure that it works to its best potential.

Honey bee hives are made of wax, which we produce ourselves. They consist of six-sided tubes, which are the shapes for optimal honey production because they require less wax and can hold more honey.

https://pxhere.com/en/photo/967338

1. Find a Location: Wild honeybees will chose an area that is protected from the elements. This could be in a sheltered rock crevice or a hollow in a tree. Bees that are kept in farms are provided with ideal spaces to build their hive such as a wooden structure like this. (insert picture) 
2. Cover Walls with Propolis:  Propolis is made from plant resins, bee's wax and their saliva. We use this substance because it has antimicrobial properties which protect us from harmful germs that have the potential to be introduced from the outside of the hive. Thin layers are added at various stages of the build of the hive.
3. Make Wax: The cells in a bee's nest are called honeycombs and are made of wax. We secrete it from glands in our abdomens. 
4. Make Cells: To form the cells, bees will chew the wax until it is soft and then add the chewed wax to the honeycomb construction. The cells are used to store pollen, nectar, eggs, larvae, water and honey.

Fun Fact: As bees age, we produce a lower quality of wax – consequently the bees in charge of building comb are usually between two to three weeks old!!!

Why are Honeycombs Hexagonal? 

Some people believe that the reason the cells are shaped like hexagons is because they require less wax but can still hold lots of honey. However, in 2013, a study was carried out that proved otherwise. A colony of bees that were in the process of making honeycomb, were deliberately disturbed. It was observed that the most recently built cells were circular and the previously built ones were hexagonal. The research showed, that the heat the bees produced while working caused the wax to melt causing the circular cells to change to hexagons. However, it is not clear whether the bees do this on purpose so both theories could, in  fact, be correct.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d0/Familiewapen_Muschart.svg/839px-Familiewapen_Muschart.svg.png





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An Overview of Bees

First of all let me introduce myself. My name is Bianca and I'm a bee. The aim of this blog is to try and educate you about my family and I, and show you how buzy my life can bee.


Here are some basic facts about bees and honey and little bit of history about us too.

• Bees originated from Asia and started spreading 300,000 years ago, across Europe and Africa.
• We fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat our wings 200 times per second.
• We can see all colours except red.
• Honeybees can only sting once, because their stingers are barbed and tear off when they try to get away.
• We are the only insect in the world that make food that humans can eat. (You should grateful!)
• One bee can only make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its entire life, which is five or six weeks long.
• I have a very big family, or colony ranging between 20,000 and 60,000 bees, but there's only one queen bee.
•  Honey is one of the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life, including enzymes, vitamins, minerals and water.

My family is divided into three different types of members - the queen, workers and drones.

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/explore/drone-bee/

1. Queen Bee- the only role of the queen is to lay as many eggs as possible. She is also responsible for regulating our behaviours, by producing chemicals so that everything runs smoothly in the hive. 
2. Workers- these bees are all female and we are the only ones that you see outside of the hive. We forage for food (nectar and pollen from flowers) and are responsible for making honey. We also build, look after and protect our hive.
3. Drones- the third class in our family are the males - drones. Several hundred drones live in the hive during spring and summer but during the winter we kick them out when we go into survival mode!

Introduction

Hello, my name is Samara and this is my blog about the journey of honey from bee to jar.