Honey
Honey is produced from the nectar of flowering plants. Plants use nectar to lure pollinators, like bees, so that pollen can be transferred from one plant to the next to allow for fertilization to take place. The bees take the nectar to the hive where it is placed in the honeycomb. At this point the nectar has too high of a water content to store for long periods so it must be dehydrated to a point where it becomes stable. If the nectar were to stay with its high water content through the winter it would eventually ferment and go bad. So the bees use their wings to generate an air current along with their body heat to dehydrate the nectar to a water content around 16%. Once it reaches this threshold it can then be called honey. However, the bees are not done. They detect that the honey has reached its proper moisture content and then they ‘cap’ the cell(s) with a thin coat of wax. The honey is now ready to store over winter and feed the bees during periods where there is no nectar, called ‘dearth’.
Harvesting
After reading above, you might be asking how the bees survive winter if all of their honey is harvested? The answer is two-fold. First, we simply do not take all of the honey produced in the hive. I estimate that we are taking roughly only half, and leaving the bees the rest. Second, we supplement the hives with a cane sugar syrup for a few weeks to make sure they have enough food for winter. The bees take the syrup and treat it like nectar.
Some beekeepers harvest only once per season and others will harvest twice. The reason for this depends on many factors including weather, how much nectar the bees are bringing in the hive, and the timing of these events. The fall harvest is different in many ways from the summer harvest. Fall honey from our farm (and many others) is darker and has a very different flavor than its summer counterpart. This is due to the different plants that are producing nectar as the season changes.
Our bee yard in the back of property near the acacia trees, pond and meadows.
Pollen content in honey
There are many substances that make up honey. One of those is pollen. The bees do come across pollen as it sticks to their bodies when they are gathering nectar; However, the bees also specifically gather pollen for their survival in the hive. The bees use pollen as the major source of protein in their diet, and also to help raise baby bees, called brood. Pollen also contains lipids (fats), vitamins, and minerals. They store the pollen near the same comb cells that they store honey. These cells that contain the pollen are called bee bread. When honey is harvested, the pollen is mixed with the honey as both are centrifuged from the comb. The pollen content of honey is important for many reasons. It is from the pollen content that the medicinal qualities of honey are derived. Specifically, several antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents. Pollen also gives us a way to know where the bees that produced the honey have been. Dr. Vaugn Bryant at Texas A&M leads the melissopalynology (the study of pollen in honey) lab in College Station. Several samples of our honey has been analyzed there and it’s quite interesting. Our summer honey contained several sources of pollen, with the major ones being rose, dewberry, willow, and acacia. An analysis of our fall harvest yielded sunflower, tallow, umbel family, just to name a few.
When honey is processed, or bottled, it must be strained in order to separate the pieces of wax comb cappings that inadvertently fly off during extraction. There’s nothing harmful about eating pieces of comb, but to some it is unwelcome to find something waxy in their honey. In order to separate the comb pieces from the honey, we strain the honey though an 1800 micron strainer. This is small enough to stop the pieces of wax but large enough that it will not stop, or filter out the pollen (size of a pollen particle ranges from 10 microns to 90 microns). Our last honey analysis showed that our pollen content was over 76,000 per 10 grams. That’s about 54,000 grains of pollen in a single teaspoon of our honey.
One more thing I’ll say regarding pollen content within honey. It is virtually the only way to determine the origin of an unknown honey. One way that honey reaches the USA illegally from China or India is by selling the banned product to a third party in another country, then labeling it as a product of (not China), then selling it to the United States and other places. These honey products are ultra-filtered and have no traces of pollen, and thus cannot be identified. A study conducted by Dr. Vaughn at Texas A&M revealed that several brands of honey purchased here in Texas did not contain any pollen at all. See article from Food Safety News “Tests Show Most Store Honey Isn't Honey”.