Harvesting honey has always been known as “robbing.”
Bees make honey and people take it from them. Honey bees are unique creatures.
They are the only insects in the temperate zone that stay alive and active
throughout the year. They do this by making and storing a high-energy food for
the winter: honey. The industrious honey bee makes honey from the nectar of
flowering plants through the spring, summer, and fall. They continue to collect
nectar as long as flowers are blooming. Then, during the dead of winter, bees
cluster inside their hive and eat their stored honey for nutrition and to
generate heat. A healthy bee hive produces about 500 pounds of honey per year,
and it eats at least 90 percent of that honey. Prudent beekeepers can rob the
excess 10 percent. However, if they get too greedy, the colony will die from
starvation. Beekeepers share the experience of those who have kept bees in the
past to learn how much honey they can safely rob. The honey harvest is a
rewarding time for the beekeeper. Harvesting a surplus of honey means that the
beekeeper has been successful in managing a large colony for the year. Some
individuals have been tempted by the promise of a bee hive that automatically
serves honey without the work of beekeeping. However, much of the joy of
beekeeping results from actually opening the hive and interacting with the bees
on their terms. Further, a bee hive with an automatic honey harvesting feature
would likely rob too much of the colony’s necessary winter food, leading to
colony starvation.
In today’s photo, taken in Larry Kichler’s honey
house, a freshly harvested frame of honey sits in the mechanical uncapper that
will make a series of thin slices through the beeswax cappings to expose the
honey for extraction. Larry expresses the joy of managing hives, handling bees,
and harvesting honey. He has 50 years of experience keeping bees and producing
honey in Kansas and Arkansas.
--Richard
Posts
