The Science Behind the Shelf Life

Honey has been used throughout history for eating, cooking, medicine, and more. Honey is a healthy, versatile food, and many people have prized this sweet treat. Ancient Egyptians were one group of people who enjoyed using honey in everyday life. While excavating Ancient Egyptian tombs recently, archaeologists have found honey in pots left by those from older times. The honey was thousands of years old, yet, the food remained unspoiled and preserved. What is it that makes honey such a special food?

Honey is the only food that never spoils. Many factors contribute to this including its lack of water, its acidity, and the presence of hydrogen peroxide in honey. Without any of these factors, honey could not remain preserved for eternity. All three of those factors work in perfect and complete harmony to make the sweet golden liquid have a never ending shelf life. 

The first factor, its lack of water, comes from honey’s chemical makeup. Honey is a natural sugar. Sugars are hygroscopic, which means that sugars contain very little water in their natural state but could readily suck up lots of moisture if left unsealed. Because honey is a sugar, it has a hygroscopic nature. How does this help honey stay preserved? Bacteria need a moist environment to grow and honey doesn’t have a moist enough environment for bacteria to grow. Bacteria that enter foods and make them spoil can’t grow in honey. There has to be something in the honey jars to make them spoil and with such a inhospitable environment for bacteria, organisms can’t live long enough to spoil our precious sweet treat!

Not only is honey hygroscopic, but it’s also acidic. Naturally, honey has a pH range of roughly 3 - 4.5. This is why you always hear that when cooking with honey, it’s always good to add baking soda to your recipe. It's because of honey’s acidic pH! This pH is so acidic that most bacteria or organisms cannot survive. Honey is just not a good home to bacteria or organisms, but it’s great in our pantry. 

There are other hygroscopic foods out there with relatively low pHs. Why does honey remain unspoiled and not other foods such as molasses? This brings us to our last important factor, the presence of hydrogen peroxide. Here’s where our lovely little girls come in, the honeybees! Nectar, which is collected from the bees to make honey, is naturally high in water content. The bees remove much of that water, once inside the hive, by flapping their wings to literally dehydrate it. On top of the dehydrating, the bees also add something special to the product. Honeybees add an enzyme that adds to honey’s resilience. This enzyme is called glucose oxidase. When the bees deposit the nectar from their mouths into the beeswax combs to make honey, the enzyme mixes with the nectar. Once mixed with the nectar, the enzyme breaks down into two by-products: gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide. Then, hydrogen peroxide also goes to work against possible spoiling agents in the honey.  For this reason, honey has been used for medical remedies and has been a cherished, long-lasting food. The hydrogen peroxide, combined with honey’s thickness, allows for the rejection of any kind of bacteria growth, and it creates the perfect barrier against the infection of wounds. 

Although honey is a super food, there is one extra factor you want to keep in mind--the seal of your honey. If you leave honey out with no seal in a humid environment, the moisture can’t be controlled and honey will spoil. This is why even inside the beehive, honeybees cap over their honey-filled cells with beeswax to preserve it! If no water is added to the honey and you keep the lid tightly on the jar, you’ve got a shelf life that will last way beyond a lifetime!

Bee Beards

What would you think if you saw a beard made out of live bees? Maybe you have seen a beekeeper do a bee beard at a festival, fair, or other event or you might have seen photos or videos of one. Have you ever wondered how a bee beard works?

Ready to wear some bees!

Bee beards are an amazing sight and a wonderful demonstration of how gentle our honeybees truly are. Bee beards also show us just how important the queen’s pheromones are to the hive, since it is her smell which causes the bees to cluster on the beekeepers face to form the bee beard.

First, a box of bees is prepared as an artificial swarm with the queen contained in a small screened cage. The person who will be wearing the beard is prepared by ensuring any jewelry or hair that would get in the way is contained and that he/she is not wearing any scents which would bother the bees.

Next, the queen cage is tied underneath the chin so that the bees will be able to smell her pheromones through the screen. A box full of worker bees is then shaken out onto a tray or barber cape worn by the person wearing the beard.  

Because the worker bees can smell the queen in the cage, they all climb up and cluster around her and form the beard of bees.

The bees beginning to cluster

Forming a fuller beard 

To remove the bee beard, the queen cage is taken off and then the rest of the bees are removed when the person wearing the beard jumps up and shakes the bees back into their box.

Wearing a bee beard feels electric! It feels funny because of all of the legs clinging to your face and the bees produce a lot of heat. It’s very neat to see how quickly the bees react to the queen pheromone and how gentle they remain throughout the whole process. Wearing a bee beard is an amazing experience and a lot of fun! 

Beeswax and the Arts

Beeswax is used in many things like cosmetics and candles, and it is also used in the arts! Beeswax is used to make beautiful encaustic paintings, detailed sculptures and sweet-smelling candles.  

Beeswax is a natural wax that is produced by honeybees. Worker honeybees have four pairs of wax glands (eight total glands) on their abdomens that produce the wax. The wax flakes off their abdomen, and the honeybees form it into cells. Honeybees use wax to build their homes or hives making honeycomb with the hexagonal shaped cells out of the wax. They store everything in these cells like larvae or baby bees,

nectar, pollen, and honey. Beekeepers melt old wax or old comb into wax blocks.

Encaustic painting is better known as a hot wax painting. The paintings are very beautiful and really show the versatility of beeswax. Normally, encaustic painters melt beeswax to use in creating and molding their beautiful paintings. Equipment like metal tools and special brushes are used to sculpt the wax. Once it's cooled, encaustic painters begin creating their art. Encaustic paintings aren’t just sculpted, they can be painted as well. The natural wax makes bright, vivid colors when mixed with other color waxes. Did you know that some of the first encaustic paintings were seen around 100-300AD in the Fayum mummy portraits from Egypt? 

Not only is beeswax used in encaustic paintings, it can be used to create some amazing sculptures! Beeswax is really easy to use when hand molding a sculpture or pouring the wax into molds to create models and figures. Since the Middle Ages and ancient Rome, sculptors have used beeswax because it cuts easily, melts at a low temperature (so you don’t need a special oven or kiln to melt it), and it can be colored. Once molded into a gorgeous sculpture, beeswax will hold up well against age. In ancient Rome, they used beeswax to make death masks to be buried with the elite or royal. Who knew beeswax had so much history?

The wick and wax that you'll need
to make your candle!

Starting to roll your candle. 

A really fun and easy DIY project with beeswax is to roll your own candle! You can buy pre-melted beeswax sheets and wicks at any large beekeeping supplier (Dadant, Glorybee, etc). They sell a rainbow of colors that can brighten up your room or even make a neat, thoughtful gift for Christmas or Mother’s Day. Once you have the sheet of wax, cut the wax with a pizza cutter or scissors into four long sheets in order to make four candles (you can cut the wax smaller or larger if needed). Next, take the wick and measure it against the width of the wax edge and cut the wick, with scissors, so a little extra wick can stick out of the wax. The extra wick sticking out will how you light your candle! After this, press the wick into the far edge of the wax and roll a little bit of the wax over the top so the wick is completely covered except the part of the wick that will burn. Now comes the easy part! Continue rolling up the candle while keeping the edges straight. Maintain pressure to make sure your candle stays tight. The tighter you roll your candle, the longer it will burn. Even candle-making can be an art! The number one thing to remember is that anyone can try using beeswax in their arts and crafts. The main goal of artwork is to “bee” creative. 

The finished rolled candle. You can make them many shapes and sizes. 

Honey in History

Many people think of  honey simply as a delicious food or sweetener. Throughout history, however, honey proves to be much more than a simple food. It is true that honey is one of the oldest sweeteners known to man and still widely popular today, but it is also an important cultural, religious, and mythological symbol.

Many different types of honey

The great diversity of honey flavors and textures available makes honey an extremely valuable staple in the kitchen. Honey has found its way onto our plates in many different forms and can be found in every type of food we consume, from appetizers to desserts, and everything in between. Honey is used in a wide range of recipes where it is prized as an all-natural sweetener as well as for its unique flavor contribution. There are more than 300 different varieties of honey produced in the United States and approximately 3,000 varieties worldwide.

An ancient cave painting
showing honey harvesting

Honey plays an important role as both a cultural and religious symbol;  it is often used to represent prosperity and wellbeing. References to honey are found in the Bible, the Koran, the Torah and other religious books. Some Greek mythology states that honey was the substance into which Cupid dipped his arrows, and mead (alcohol made from honey) has been called “the nectar of the gods.”

In ancient science and medicine, honey was appreciated for its unique healing properties. Some of the earliest known medical writings, including the Ebers Papyrus, include honey as an important ingredient in many remedies.

Burn cream made with honey

Today, honey is used to heal burns and wounds, treat allergies, fight infection and soothe sore throats. The antibacterial properties of Manuka honey have been studied at Universities in New Zealand for over 20 years, and its effectiveness in treating MRSA is still being studied. Honey is also a key ingredient in many cosmetic and beauty products.

Honey has a special place throughout history, and it continues to play an important role in many different cultures and religions. Honey has been a part of earliest history, and it remains at the forefront of new research and developments. Honey is a product with both a rich past and a bright future.

The Language of the Honey Bee

Honeybee dancing is an intriguing topic. The dances of the honeybee are performed when a worker bee returns to the honeycomb inside the hive with pollen or nectar. These dances make up a language that tells other worker bees in the hive where the food is located outside the hive. By signaling both distance and direction with specific movements of the bee, the worker bee uses this language of dance to direct other workers on where to forage for pollen and nectar. 

Distance and direction of the floral source are told in two parts of the dance. 

To convey distance, the worker bees do a few different signals. When the food source is close to the hive, or less than 50 meters away, a forager will perform a round dance. The circle dance is when she runs around on the honey comb making narrow circles and then suddenly reverses direction to her original course. They can repeat the dance several times while running across the comb and may move to different spots on the honey comb to convey the message. After the dance, the worker will share some food with the other foragers following her so they can also locate the flowers by smell. A round dance overall says, “close to the hive.”

Food sources that aren’t as close to the hive or are between 50 and 150 meters from the hive are portrayed to the other worker bees using the sickle dance. This dance is what could be described as crescent shaped and is a mix of the round dance and the waggle dance. The waggle dance is to convey that food sources are more than 150 meters from the hive. This dance not only tells the other foragers distance, but also lets them know the direction of the floral source. A worker bee performing this dance runs straight ahead for a short distance, returns in a semicircle to the starting point of the dance, runs again through the straight course, them makes a semicircle in the opposite direction to make a figure eight circuit (NY State University). While completing this circle, the bee’s body, especially the abdomen, shakes or wags vigorously from side to side (To watch the waggle dance check out this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUCoLeI5Qxg). She also lets out a buzzing noise from her wings beating during the dance. While many variables in this dance refer to distance (dance tempo or duration of buzzing sounds), the most reliable part of the dance is the straight-run portion. As the distance to the food increases, so does the length of the waggle part of the dance. If the distance to the food decreases, so does the waggle portion of the dance. 

To help show the direction of where the food is outside the hive, honeybees will change the position of their dance. The orientation of the dancing bee during the straight portion of her waggle dance indicates the location of the food source relative to the sun. The bee takes the solar angle of where the food source is located and turns it into the gravitational angle to convey in the dance where the food is located. Since the sun changes place in the sky throughout the day, the bees dance will change throughout the day even for the same floral source because they use the sun to tell the other bees, using geometry, where the food is. Therefore, if you want to know where the honeybees are communicating to forage, you need to know the angle of the waggle run and the compass direction of the sun, which depends on the location, date, and time of day. 

If you're interested in where I learned about honeybee communication, check outhttp://www.cals.ncsu.edu/entomology/apiculture/pdfs/1.11%20copy.pdf by NY State University andhttp://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/insects/ahb/lsn14.html by University of Arizona.

Careers in Honey Bees

Honeybees are interwoven into many different aspects of our lives and play an incredibly critical role in the pollination of many different crops. Because honeybees are so important to us, there are many different careers which include spending lots of time with these little insects! Here are a few of the careers in honeybees and what they entail.

Beekeeper:

Beekeepers are the people who manage honeybees year-round. While small-scale beekeepers who maintain only a few hives and keep them in one location may only have to work with their hives every other week, commercial beekeepers who manage thousands of bee hives work with their bees as a full-time job. Commercial beekeepers not only produce honey to sell, they also ship their bees across the country to pollinate many different crops. 

Queen Rearer:

The queen bee in a honeybee hive is the mother of all the other bees in that hive, which makes her the single most important bee in the entire beehive. Because the queen is so important, there are beekeepers who focus just on producing new queens. Queen Rearers focus on raising and breeding healthy new queens to keep our beehives strong. The queens are shipped to beekeepers all over the country once they are ready to begin their duties in the hive.

Apiary Inspectors:

Apiary Inspectors work for the state apiary departments to regulate beekeeping across the country. Apiary Inspectors visit apiaries to ensure that beekeepers are following state requirements which ensure that bees and the people around them are safe. Inspectors also check the health of the hives to make sure the bees are being properly cared for and do not have any diseases which could harm other bees in the area. Another task of an apiary inspector is to educate beekeepers and the public about issues relating to bees, from why we keep them to how to get started for yourself.

Supply Manufacturer/Distributer: 

Keeping bees requires special equipment and the people who manufacture and distribute supplies play an important role in keeping bees. Supply manufacturers make many different items which we need to effectively keep bees. Bee suits to protect beekeepers from stings,  wooden hives to house our bees and nutrient and mineral supplements to feed our bees. Distributors bring those supplies all across the country and make it available to local beekeepers.  

Pest Control Operator/Swarm Catcher:

Honeybees and other insects are great...most of the time. Sometimes bees and others insects become a problem when they decide to move in where they shouldn’t be living and start causing problems for humans. Pest Control Operators and Swarm Catchers are able to capture and remove swarms of bees which have taken up residence where they don’t belong. Pest Control Operators also remove many other types of insects and can exterminate insects if necessary.

Scientist:

Scientists all over the world are researching honeybees to try and learn the causes of diseases in bees, how to best manage our bees to keep them healthy, why bees exhibit certain behaviors, and many other questions. Scientist also help to educate beekeepers with the information they gather in their research. They play a very important role in helping to keep our honeybees happy.

Just like in a beehive where different bees perform different tasks to keep things running smoothly, there are many different jobs in honeybees so that we our bees stay as healthy as possible. The many different aspects of caring for and studying bees are all important roles performed by a wide variety of talented people across the country. What is your favorite honeybee career?

From the Hive to your Home

When you aren’t a beekeeper or don’t know a beekeeper, you get jars of honey from the store or buy it from a local beekeeper and that’s about it. Have you ever wondered how that honey gets to the jar and then into your home? It can be a long process for beekeepers to extract honey, but in the end, the final golden, delicious product is worth it. 

The first thing the beekeeper does is gather the frames full of honey comb and honey from the beehive. They need a smoker in order to complete this job. The beekeeper will light the smoker using pine needles, dry branches or other easily flammable kindling. The smoker is an essential tool because it calms the honeybees and makes them gorge on honey, which further pacifies them so beekeepers can work the hive. The beekeeper will open the hive with a hive tool and blow some smoke into the hive while lifting the lid slowly. 

 

Next, the beekeeper pulls frames out of the super and inspects the honey combs. There could be multiple supers on one hive, each filled with frames. Depending on how busy the bees were, how warm it was, and if the hive didn’t swarm, there could be anywhere from 20 to 100 pounds of honey in a super! Only completely sealed frames of honey are harvested. An easy way to transport the frames full of honey is to have an extra empty super to put them in until the beekeeper can extract the honey. Each frame can hold an average of 6.5 pounds of honey. 

Once the beekeeper is ready to extract the honey, they have to uncap the wax cells from both sides of the frame. They place the frame above a tub to catch the wax and honey that comes off with the wax. The beekeeper will run a heated knife called an uncapping knife down each side of the frame to unseal the cells. They don’t linger too long on the frame with the uncapping knife, because it can burn the honey! Then, the beekeeper will use an uncapping fork to gently shave off the caps of the cells to catch any cells that weren't uncapped with the heated knife.

 

After uncapping each frame, they place the frames into an extractor. This is a large barrel like machine that has a motor or hand crank used to spin the frames. When they start the extractor, the centrifugal force created by the extractor spins the honey out of the honeycomb onto the walls of the extractor. Thanks to gravity, the honey drips to the bottom of the extractor. There is a spout (which can be kept closed or open) where honey comes out at the bottom of the extractor.  

The beekeeper can either place a food grade bucket underneath the spout to catch the honey and bottle it later or bottle it as it comes out of the extractor. Typically they’ll place something like a colander over the jar or bucket to strain any extra wax that may have ended up in the honey. After they pour honey from the extractor into the jars, it’s locally sold or sent to farmers markets or grocery stores where it finally makes it to your home!

Helping the Honeybees

As the weather warms up in Spring, honeybees all across the country are breaking out of their winter clusters and once again flying from their hives to carry out the many tasks required to keep the hive healthy.

Unfortunately, each time we begin a  new beekeeping year, most beekeepers in the United States will have lost one third of their beehives. Honeybees are at risk because of many different factors. Similar to humans, honeybees can suffer from viruses, pests, and diseases. Also, an increasingly flowerless landscape and pesticides play a part.

The good news is that you can do something to help! From city to country, we can all help the honeybees. No matter how big or small you are, there are a few simple things you can do to make a big difference.

Planting bee friendly flowers:

Honeybees pollinate 80% of our crops while they are flying from flower to flower gathering nectar and pollen for their hives. In one collecting trip, a worker bee will visit 50-100 flowers to collect and bring back food for their hive. If the worker bees cannot find any flowers, there will be no food for the bees to eat.

Just like humans need to eat different types of foods to stay healthy, bees also need to eat a variety of different flowers.The more flowers that are available and the closer they are to each beehive, the healthier the bees will be.

Humans need to eat food throughout

the whole year, and so do our bees! In winter when it is too cold to fly outside, the bees will eat the honey that they have stored in their hive. During the rest of the year, they need to collect extra food for winter. To help the bees, we need to make sure to plant flowers that bloom at different times of the year so they have food all year long. While honeybees face many different problems, making sure they have enough nutritious food goes a long way towards keeping them healthy!

To find a list of honeybee and pollinator friendly plants for your area visit pollinator.org

Buying honey from a local beekeeper:

Honey is a delicious and healthy treat from our wonderful buzzing friends, it is the only food that never spoils and the only food made by insects which humans consume. Honey also comes in a wonderful array of colors and flavors unique to the area in which it was produced.

Buying from a local beekeeper ensures that you know where your honey came from and helps the beekeepers support their bees. You can often find local honey for sale at fairs and farmers markets.

Learning more about honeybees:

Honeybees are very amazing and complex insects. They help to provide food for us to eat, treat us to tasty honey, and amaze and fascinate people around the world every day.

The better we understand honeybees, the better able we are to care for them and protect them. If you take the time to learn more about honeybees, you will be astonished at all these little insects can do and the simple things we can do to help them.

Think of Honey as Nature's Medicine Chest

You typically hear of honey being used for eating and for cooking. Have you ever thought about using honey for medicinal purposes? For more than 2,000 years, honey has been used medicinally. Aristotle even said honey was good as a salve for sore eyes and wounds! Honey can be used in multiple ways to improve your health on a daily basis. Here’s a few ways honey can help your health!

Enhances the Immune System

Honey stimulates our bodies to produce B-lymphocytes and T-lymphocytes. These lymphocytes seek out and destroy antigens, so they are very are important in immune system health. Eating 1-2 tablespoons of honey a day can help to boost your immune system!

Reduces Inflammation

Other than honey’s properties to combat bacterial infection, honey also has anti-inflammatory properties. Inflammation has been reduced by honey when there were no infections involved.

Stimulates Cell Growth

Wounds sometimes can show no signs of healing after long periods of time. It has been found that when wounds like this are treated with honey, the healing process, and cell regeneration, begins. Honey does this by promoting the formation of granulation tissue and by stimulating the growth of epithelium over wounds. These two necessary tissues basically form the new skin of the wound when it begins to heal or is healed.

Antioxidant Activity

Antioxidants are vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that may protect your cells from the effects of free radicals. Free radicals are molecules produced when your body breaks down food for energy, or by environmental toxins like cigarette smoke and radiation. Free radicals can damage cells, weaken the immune system and may play a role in heart disease, arthritis, cancer and other diseases. Multiple honeys, when tested, have shown varying degrees of antioxidant activity. The three honeys with the highest antioxidant content –Illinois buckwheat, California sunflower, and Hawaii Christmas berry- are dark colored honeys. Don’t count light honeys out though! They contain antioxidant activity as well just in lower amounts.  Manuka honey from New Zealand has also been shown to have very high antioxidant activity. 

Honey for Wounds

Due to little or no tearing of newly grown tissue when dressings are changed, wounds dressed with honey heal faster than with dry dressings. Moist environments are conducive to bacterial growth, yet most wounds heal best in a moist environment. The antibacterial properties found in honey solve this dilemma, making honey superior to other dressings. It's been said honey is great for small cuts and burns thanks to its amazing properties!

Honey in general is very healthy! The next time you head to your local farmers market or buy honey from a local beekeeper, remember honey is not just for eating! It has a multitude of other uses. Think of honey as nature’s medicine chest! For more information on honey as nature’s medicine and to see where some of my information came from, check out the book Honey: The Gourmet Medicine by Joe Traynor.

Bees on the Move

All over the world, beekeepers keep honeybees in hives so that they can harvest delicious honey and have their gardens and crops pollinated by this industrious insect.

Beehives on a roof

There are approximately 200,000 beekeepers in the United States who keep from one to thousands of bee hives. Most of these beekeepers are small-scale, meaning they only keep a few hives of honeybees for themselves. Often, these beehives are kept in a backyard, on a porch, or even on a rooftop! A few beehives is enough for these beekeepers to pollinate their own land and produce honey for their family.

Commercial beekeepers keep hundreds or even thousands of honeybee hives for commercial use. Keeping this many honeybees is a full-time job, and commercial beekeepers depend on their honeybees for all of their income. Commercial beekeepers will produce large amounts of honey to bottle and sell, rent their hives to growers for pollination, raise honeybee hives to sell to new beekeepers, or sell other products produced by the honeybees.

Migratory beekeeping is a special type of commercial beekeeping. Beekeepers who “migrate” move their honeybee hives all across the country so that the honeybees can pollinate crops. Pollination is the fertilization of plants necessary to produce nuts, fruits, and even seeds. For a plant to be pollinated, the pollen grains need to be moved from the stamen (the male part of the flower) to the pistil (female part of the flower) so that fertilization can occur. There are many different animals and insects that pollinate plants. Bats, wasps, butterflies, and of course honeybees are all important pollinators. Honeybees are especially good pollinators because pollen is their primary source of protein. As they travel from flower to flower collecting pollen to eat, they pollinate our crops.

A full truck of beehives

Pollination is the single most important service that honeybees provide for us, and migratory beekeepers are responsible for large portion of that! Moving hundreds of beehives across the nation isn’t easy, so migratory beekeepers have to plan and prepare plenty of time in advance. The honeybees are moved at night after the foragers have returned to their hive so that honeybees will not be left behind. To ship the honeybees, the beekeepers load the hives onto large flatbed trucks (450 hives per truck!), and the bees are then driven to crops which need to be pollinated.

Hives in the California almond groves

A migratory beekeeper may bring their hives to pollinate the almond groves in California, the blueberries in Maine, the Cranberries in Wisconsin, and many other crops throughout the country! Because of their role in pollination, honeybees create every third bite of food we eat-- even if the food doesn’t have any honey in it. So the next time you eat a handful of almonds or bite into a juicy apple, remember to thank the honeybees who pollinated it for you! 

The World of Beekeeping

Beekeeping is gaining popularity everywhere. There are around 212,000 beekeepers in the United States and many more throughout the world. Each place in the world, including the United States, has its own ways of beekeeping. Let’s explore two of these amazing and unique ways of beekeeping!

A beekeeper in Nepal collects honey.

One interesting way of beekeeping is in the high Himalayan foothills of central Nepal where teams of men come to harvest honey twice a year. Before harvesting honey from the honeybees, the community holds a harvest ritual where they gather together to pray and sacrifice flowers, fruits, and rice. Then, a fire is lit at the base of the cliff to smoke the honeybees from their honeycombs, allowing the men to gather the honey. From above the beehives, a “honey hunter,” or beekeeper, travels down the cliff using ropes attached to a ladder. The beekeeper then cuts out chunks of honey from the honeycomb while the honeybees are flying around (the smoke makes them leave their hive). For hundreds of years, the skills to perform this fascinating task have been passed down through generations in Nepal. 

                

The inside of a honeybee hive in Uganda.

Another place with a fascinating way of beekeeping is Uganda. Beehives in Uganda are traditionally constructed from timber or woven from bamboo plants. Honey in this area is normally harvested twice a year between March-June and August-October. Beekeepers in Uganda commonly use grass torches and fire at night to smoke the honeybees out of the hive to harvest honey. A few of the honeys they produce are Savannah bush honey and golden blossom honey. In Uganda, honey is most often eaten directly from the comb instead of in liquid form. 

There are many different areas in the world that keep honeybees. Looking at these examples from Nepal and Uganda, you can see that there’s a variety of places and ways you can manage honeybees. Remember, anyone can be a beekeeper! If you're interested in learning more about becoming a beekeeper, click here.

2014 Representatives Crowned in Baton Rouge

The new American Honey Queen and Princess were selected at the 2014 North American Beekeeping Conference in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  

2014 American Honey Queen

Susannah Austin from Florida

2014 American Honey Princess

Elena Hoffman from Pennsylvania

They will be posting about their travels on behalf of the beekeeping industry. Keep an eye out for new facts, beekeeping topics and videos throughout the year.

2014 American Honey Queen Susannah Austin &
2014 American Honey Princess Elena Hoffman