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.
