Club100 || My experience with honey bee harvesting day

in club100 •  2 years ago 

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Hi steemians,

I present today a beautiful experience that I lived it yesterday in the farm of my father-in-law by coincidence, Yes as you have seen in the welcome photo I will tell you about a honey harvest day which was very beneficial for me in terms of knowledge that I wanted to share with you. So fasten your seatbelts to start this great adventure.

At the end of the flower nectar season, when the honeydew is full, it is transferred to the apiary. The honey must be ripe and the waxy disk completely sealed with a thin wax cap. For incomplete waxy tablets, the honey stored in it is immature and quickly ferments.

It is preferable to collect honeycombs from the cells in the early morning. During the harvesting process, the beekeeper needs a number of equipment. Honey is separated from the wax frames by separators, preferably in a building specially prepared for this purpose that contains all the tools for sorting and preparing honey for marketing, and it must be clean.

Because the weather factors of high temperature help to lose that honey, as the lack of bees in high temperatures makes them go back (return or bounce) on honey and devour it, and suddenly you find that the honey crop is useless and sometimes not at all, especially when the period between the examination and the examination is prolonged. Here the aforementioned proverb must be implemented.

The lack and scarcity of nectar and the delay in sorting processes make bees devour honey, especially in unstable weather conditions, unavailability of nectar sources and lack of pasture. The beekeeper's lack of knowledge of the bee business is one of the reasons that the honey crop is lost.

As for the trained beekeeper, he performs the operations of collecting the tablets for sorting after the completion of the processes of sealing the tablets (their ripening) because he is familiar with his bee operations and knows the areas of bee stings and the dates of flowering of each crop and the succession of flowers for different crops, that is, he is fully aware and aware of his region, because the mature tablets of honey have many advantages.

Unlike immature honey and what we call incomplete (sealed) spray honey.

honey picking :

Honey: It is the main purpose of beekeeping and honey picking. It has basic dates that the beekeeper must know from the dates of the flowers around his apiary.. It started from sorting citrus, alfalfa and the rest of the nectar crops, and the number of sorting times may reach twice a season.

Sometimes we pick three harvests when the season is strong, and in some areas it may reach four.

  • There should not be excessive harvesting of honey, but rather a section should be left to meet the needs of the community after each harvest season.

  • The pasture is light after a harvest at the end of the summer season, and after the fall harvest comes winter.

  • Picking can be done before the end of the season in order to leave a period for the bees to restore themselves nutritionally.

Picking methods:

The maturity of honey is indicated by sealing all or most of the wax eyes with a layer of wax. These methods include:

1 - Direct ways by smoking: - It is the most important.
2- By the bee drain that is placed 24 hours before the picking.
3- By expelling some chemicals such as phenic acid, which is not desirable, as the bees are expelled towards the breeding box.

The direct method: the smoking method and is done as follows:

  • Prepare an outer cover with an empty honeycomb inside.
    Smoking is done at the cell door, we wait 1-2 minutes and we take off the outer cover, then we bring a burlap bag and wet it with water and put it over the empty tube (the water should not run from the bag), and we bring at least two covers, two honeycombs, and two or three bags.

  • We smoke on the opening of the inner cover and after a while we remove it and then smoke on the tires and remove the tire before the last. If there is mature honey (sealed eyes) we shake it two or three times over the hive and then with the brush we clean the tire as much as possible from the remaining bees, then put the tire in the empty honeycomb and cover it with burlap Thus, we remove the rest of the tires and put them in the tube, one by one, until the tube is full.

  • Then we put another honeycomb on top of the first honeycomb and so we have a tower of honeysuckle and when it finishes carrying honey in the car and before moving, the honey is revealed and we slowly walk until the remaining bees come out of the tires where we circle around the apiary.

Note: The burlap sack is placed on top of the last honeycomb in the tower, that is, whenever we add a honeycomb, the burlap bag is moved and placed on top of it, and so on.

honey sorting:

The frames are transferred to the honey-sorting room, which is a special room that is sealed and covers the windows with nets equipped with funnels to ensure that the bees exit and do not return, and it is also taken into account that they are clean.

Sort tools

1- Scraping knives: They have a sharp blade on both sides and a wooden hand that is heated before use and may be heated by steam, and there are types that are heated by electricity and there is a scraping fork.

2- The separator: a barrel equipped with holders for tablets that are managed manually or automatically and operate in a centrifugal way.

3- The filter: looks like a stainless barrel. The primary filter is carried out through two filters: the upper one with wide holes and the other with fewer holes by means of these two filters. Wax residues and various fine materials are reserved.

As for the second filter: a light gauze cloth is used under the filter to seize all foreign materials with wax crumbs, and this results in pure honey.

Sometimes honey is left in the sump for 3 days, as light substances float on the surface of the honey, such as pollen and some wax atoms (honey bees), where we scrape off these residues, while the solid residues are deposited at the bottom of the sump.

There are two ways to sort:

1- tangential sorting: in which the sorting process is carried out in two stages: where the frame is longitudinally in front of the spinning axis in the sorter, and thus the honey is sorted from one of the two sides, where the frame is flipped to sort the other side.

2- Radial sorting: in which the sorting process is carried out so that the frame is its base along the axis of rotation, where the two faces are sorted together.

Thus, the steps for sorting honey are:

1- Unpack the discs.
2- Scraping the wax layer with a scraping knife, where the thin waxy layer on the hexagonal eyes is scraped from top to bottom after holding the tire with the left hand on one side and resting the other end on the sorting table and placing it tilted to your right side. After scraping, the tires are placed in an empty honeycomb box. Placed in a clean outer cover.
3- Sorting.
4- The first filter.
5- The second filter.
6- Packing.

After sorting, the honey is collected at the bottom of the sieve that has a spout from which the honey comes out, and it is taken to the sump to stay about (2) days for filtering.

Then it is taken directly from the filter into packages, preferably dark in color, because the light affects the honey, and it is better to fill the honey directly after making sure that it is clean to ensure that it does not freeze in the filter and therefore the difficulty of filling it.

1 - Any temperature that affects honey and its components, and it is preferable to leave it as it is.
2- After the honey is sorted, the tires are returned to the cells at night and placed in an empty honeycomb above the inner cover of the cell, where the bees come out through the opening of the inner cover and clean the frame. After several days, the frames can be reorganized in the cells.

Honey storage:

For proper storage of honey, the following must be observed:

1- Using packing tools made of glass, wood or pottery. Do not use metal containers because they interact with dextrose and produce toxic materials. Packing in plastic containers changes its nature.

2- Keeping honey away from strong odors: because honey acquires odors quickly.

3- Keeping honey away from moisture. Increasing the humidity of honey from 20% leads to the activity of yeasts. The best degree of honey storage is 5-10°C in dry and well-ventilated stores.

How are the discs preserved for the following year?

1- Returning the tablets after they have been sorted to the apiary so that the bees can clean them and lick the honey in them.
2- The use of smoking by sulfur before storing it.
3- Check the discs frequently for the speed of eliminating any infection with wax worms.

In the evening I went up to the roof to enjoy the scenic views and took some pictures, but what spoiled the day was the outbreak of a fire in the opposite mountains, seasonal fires that cost the country several losses.

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You have shared a very amazing piece about these wonderful creatures, bees. I have heard about such farms numerous times before and have seen their images but I have not been this close to such an explanation of how honey is being harvested.

It's a great pleasure to have read through this, I got familiar with the tools utilized in the process and how some of the products are conserved to meet the community's needs after the harvest season, amazing! I can't wait to have a firsthand experience of the processes you had, regarding honey harvest.

Thanks for sharing this useful information with us.

Thank you.

Once I got hold of a discarded beehive in my yard. It was full of honey but the bees left it for some reason. I squeezed it in a gauze cloth and was able to fill a small bottle of honey. That was my only but amazing experience.

This article was quite an interesting read because I didn't know how beekeepers harvest the honey on large scale.

Thanks a lot.

He @chriddi - das habt Ihr alles noch vor Euch...? Das ist eine Wissenschaft!

Hey @chriddi - you still have all that ahead of you...? It's a science!

Jo. Genau so haben „wir“ es letztes Jahr gemacht. Die Rapsblüte hat unser Imker den Bienen „geschenkt“, vielleicht rührt er sich ja zur Ernte der Sommertracht. Ansonsten könnte ich den nie entstandenen Bericht vom Vorjahr samt Fotos aus der Konserve ja mal veröffentlichen… ;-)
Nee, momentan absolute Lustlosigkeit.

Oh ;-(( Ich dachte, Du kämst langsam wieder auf den Geschmack... Dann braucht es noch ein wenig mehr Zeit. Bis dahin...

Hab mich bei o1eh mal wieder „steempolitisch“ verausgabt. Zunächst vielversprechende Reaktion des Steemit-Teams lässt im Endeffekt noch immer auf sich warten. Insofern gehe ich davon aus, dass sich trotz brillanter Vorschläge aller Diskussionsbeteiligten wieder nichts bewegt. Damit muss ich erstmal wieder umgehen… 😉
Zum Produzieren reicht‘s noch nicht. Draußen ist’s schöner. Hab mir jetzt erstmal ne Schafschermaschine besorgt… 😁

Was immer Dich glücklich macht ;-)))

Breeding green goodness!💚☘ Resteemed.

  ·  2 years ago (edited)

@mrsokal, Why did you remove your curation, is there any problem with the content??

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Hello @kouba01, your content was really very fantastic. There is no problem with it. Even i always try to follow you. And i also selected to give your post in top post selection. But then i see that you posts on your blog not in any community. i think as a community curator we should only curate posts made on any community not in blog. Hope you will understand my situation.

@mrsokal - You are totally wrong Posts do not need to be in any community to be voted on by the Community Curators.

@ashkhan - @mrsokal is totally incorrect here. Posts do not need to be in a community to be curated.

Please ensure your team are checking all posts on their tags not just those in communities.

This is a very good post - worthy of a vote, and potentially being in your selection of the week.

@mrsokal might want to reconsider his position on your team.

cc @deepak94, @f2i5, @juzkid, @marlyncabrera, @samuel20 @kouba01

We appreciate you have taken the time to educate us on this matter. Thank you very much for the due instruction. We are positively curating posts outside communities as well. And we can see you're absolutely right that this post needs to be nominated for the best picks.

@steemcurator01, I am totally agree with you that the post is really fantastic and it also deserve to be in top post.

But i was wrong in the world ''community curators''. I thought as this position is called community curators then we should curate only posts on community. But now it is clear to me that we can vote them who will post on blog also.

@mrsokal might want to reconsider his position on your team.

I am not clear about this statement. If you think that i am not ok for this position because i get the wrong meaning of "community curators" then i accept my mistake. I was wrong about this.

@mrsokal Maybe you're right but most of the communities I belong to don't allow this kind of publication like cryptoacademy or curation communities that's why I shared it on my blog.

I would like to invite you to post on other communities for sometimess for these types of post so we can get inspiration and learn more from you.

With pleasure.

Hello, @kouba01. Your article has been supported using the @steemcurator05.

Congratulations! This post has been upvoted through steemcurator08

Curated by @ashkhan

SteemCor07 - Lifestyle Curation Team

I always like your posts, Prof.
I got knowledge about this,
This inspires my post to be better and more informative,
Thank you prof...
👍👍👍

Thank you @steemcurator01 for your support.