BEE KEEPING 

We may been doing this for almost a century but the real honey experts are our bees. We simply make sure our products find you the way nature intended.

The Hive and its Harvest from the tireless Honeybee
Honey is a super-saturated (extremely low moisture) solution of sugars and other substances produced by honey bees. The raw material used by bees to make honey comes predominately from the nectar of flowers.

Honey bees collect the sugary raw material during foraging flights, and hold it in an internal organ called the honey sac. An average load of nectar during the honey flow is about 40mg.

A pair of glands called the hypopharyngeal glands, found in the base of the head of worker bees, produce the enzymes diastase, invertase and glucose oxidase. Invertase is the enzyme that breaks down most of the sucrose present in the nectar into glucose (dextrose) and fructose (levulose). Worker honey bees add invertase to the nectar, both during collection (by foraging bees), and during ripening in the colony (by house bees). Foraging bees return to the hive and pass over nectar to house bees for ripening into honey.

The amount of moisture in nectar at time of collection can vary from 4-60% or more. During the ripening process, individual house bees expose the nectar as a thin film on their proboscis (tongue), allowing moisture to evaporate off in the warm, dry air of the hive. Half-ripened honey is then deposited by the bees as small droplets or a thin film on the wax cells for final ripening. Honey in the cells is sealed off with wax caps once the moisture has been reduced to approximately 19% or less.

Beekeepers remove filled, capped combs of honey from the hive, and take them to extraction plants. The wax cappings that cover the honey are removed by knives, and the exposed honey is then spun out under centrifugal force in purpose-built honey extractors.