50 kilos of honey harvested from the Fifty Bees hives! A fine vintage for our bees.
50 kilos of honey! That is what our beekeeper harvested this year from the three hives thriving on the rooftop terrace of Fifty Bees... A very fine performance considering the climate clearly impacted our bees' production! The rainy spring prevented proper colony development and the summer heatwave weakened them...
Producing a kilo of honey is a colossal effort for these insects: to make 1 kg of honey, a forager bee must work for approximately 200 days, travel 40,000 km (around the Earth) and visit roughly 800,000 flowers! Fortunately, the hive is a society as well organised as a large company... Around the queen, whose sole task is to lay eggs ceaselessly (2,000 eggs per day in spring), up to 50,000 workers toil without rest while a few hundred drones idle about – when they are not fertilising the queen! During their short lives (30 to 45 days in spring and summer), bees perform up to seven different roles: cleaner, nurse, architect, handler, ventilator, guard and forager.
A fine example of versatility to adapt to the company's needs... When the bees have finished their work, the beekeeper takes over for the delicate task of harvesting. After lightly smoking the hives, he harvests only the "super" (the upper section of the hive) placed in spring and leaves the rest (the hive body) for the bees so they have enough provisions to feed themselves, raise larvae and survive winter. Ultimately, the beekeeper takes only 20% of the bees' production – a sort of VAT, in a way.
Once the compartment is detached, it is set on its edge and swept with a leaf blower to push the bees from the super back into the hive body, without injuring them. The beekeeper must make sure the queen is not in the super because, her sole role being to lay eggs, she would be unable to find her way back to the hive, however close it might be! The queen is easy to spot as she is 5 mm longer than the workers... It does happen, however, that the queen gets blown out with her sisters.
If the beekeeper cannot get her back into the hive, quite a commotion ensues: the workers begin raising their abdomens and wings to release pheromones, calling the other bees back and signalling that something is wrong. A cluster of bees forms around the queen to keep her company and leaves the hive. This is known as swarming. (In nature, swarming only occurs when the colony is overcrowded.
). The workers in the now-queenless hive will then start raising 6 to 7 eggs which, as larvae, will be fed exclusively on royal jelly to produce a new queen – in the bee world, diet determines caste. The super is then taken to the honey house for uncapping. In other words, a knife is used to remove the layer of wax that sealed the honey, preventing the nectar from dehydrating and stopping fungi and fermentation.
Each frame is then placed in an extractor that uses centrifugal force to empty its contents. The honey ejected from the frames is then filtered in a rotary tank. All that remains is to put the honey into jars! 430 custom jars this year, which we were delighted to offer to the entrepreneurs we support every day in their business ventures...
(A big THANK YOU to Philippe Michel for his beekeeping talent and his explanations, as thorough as they were clear!