When we talk of bees, we always think of honey first and honey is the main reason why we breed bees. The bees collect sweet nectar or different kinds of honeydew and bring it to the hive, where they deposit it into the cells of the combs. For a single kilogram of honey, the bees have to visit a couple of million of flowers. The nectar brought to the hive contains a lot of water. The bees remove the water by moving the nectar from cell to cell, while at the same time they create air flow with rapid wing movement, which carries the water fumes out of the hive. When the honey in the cells is sufficiently dense - we say that it has ripened – the bees covered it with wax cappings and thus protect it from moisture. The honey extracted from flowers has to condense for longer periods of time, while honey from honeydew contains a lesser amount of water from the very beginning. When we estimate that the surplus honey stores in the hive are sufficient, we prepare for the most pleasant, but also the most demanding beekeeping task – the extraction of honey.
The bees have filled the hive with sweet honey, which they stored in honey combs. The beehive is divided into the brood chamber and food chamber. The brood chamber contains the queen cell and new brood and in the food chamber the bees store their honey. Both chambers are usually divided by a queen excluder – a special net that prevents the queen from accessing the honey combs – which other bees can pass through freely. In the trailer we can see combs full of honey, which the bees have already covered with wax cappings. This is a sign, that the honey has ripened and is suitable for extracting.
Before we can start filling honey, we have to take the combs out of the hive and remove the bees from it. We take comb after comb out of the food chamber and insert them into a contraption – bee brush machine, where special brushes brush off the bees into the container bellow. When we have brushed all the combs in the food chamber, we put the unharmed bees from the container back into the hive.
After we have removed the bees from the combs, we take the combs to the room for extracting of honey. We put it on a stand for uncapping of combs and remove the wax cappings with which the bees have covered honey in order to protect it from moisture, with special beekeeping, uncapping forks.
We put the uncapped combs into the honey extractor and turn it on. While spinning, the centrifugal force squeezes the honey out of the cells to the rim of the honey extractor, which is clearly seen in the trailer. From here, the honey flows into the lower part of the honey extractor. When the combs are emptied on one side, we stop the honey extractor and turn the combs over, so the honey can be drained from the other side as well. We then give the empty combs back to the bees in the hives from where we took them.
When the extracting of honey is ended, we pour the honey from the honey extractor into storing or filling tanks and from whence we later fill it into jars and offer it to the consumer. Thanks to this process, the Slovene beekeepers are able to produce top quality produce that cannot be compared to honey of unknown origin and production methods, which can be found on store shelves of various shopping centers at ridiculously low prices.