Harvest season of honey from my Bees (Apis melifera) | Step by step

After an arduous work with the bees (Apis melifera) to have the beehives with high populations and free of diseases, the flowering season of the citrus trees begins, immediately the bees begin to collect the nectar from the flowers of the orange trees and lemons, they transport it to the hives and several days later they have their reserves ready to offer us this rich nectar that we call honey.

Citrus honey has a unique and delicate flavor that differentiates it from the flavor of the mastranto honeys, which, together with that of the acacia flower, is one of the most harvested at the Mesa de Guanipa in Venezuela. Citrus honey, like other honeys, has medicinal properties that help with your health and well-being. For example we can say that they have antioxidant properties with anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic and anticancer effects that also support the immune system of your body. It also serves, among other things, as a supplier of minerals such as boron, zinc, calcium, selenium, magnesium, manganese, copper, potassium and sodium.

Once the frames are collected in the hives, they are taken to the uncapped room where the wax cover, called the operculum, is removed, which is placed by the same bee when the moisture of the nectar decreases inside the hive and is ready to store for long periods in the cells.

This operculum is removed by us with a knife at high temperatures that do not damage the structure of the cells of the frames, which, once extracted the honey, we will place again in the hives so that they are filled again by our bees.

Once the pictures are unpacked, we proceed to take the centrifuge machine, which will help us extract the honey from the cells if we break the frames and the wax. We do this because later the empty pictures are taken to the hives.

And finally we proceed to filter and bottle our honey. Something very important is that according to the moisture content of honey can crystallize in the bottle, because pure honey bees crystallize (crystallization is the passage from the liquid state of honey to a solid state that is synonymous with freshness and purity in the honey of bees) and to return to its natural state, it suffices to apply a little temperature to the bottle in a mary bath.