Posts Tagged ‘Honey Bees’

Knowledge on raising honey bees is an interesting hobby beekeeping. And if you make it successful, it can become one of the rewarding professions. Bees have an important role in the environment. They are the one responsible in making flowers to bloom through the process of pollination. Unfortunately, the number of bees now is decreasing because of the interruption of pests.

If you will engage yourself into hobby beekeeping you can do a lot of favor for the planet. You can help bring back the beauty of the planet. But if you want to ensure your beekeeping success, you should have healthy bees in your hive.

Hive is the place where bees live. Hives can either be natural or artificial. Today, it is difficult to find natural hives because of the increasing number of pest found in the environment. However, if you have the chance to find a natural hive, you can get there additional bees to your hive.

You need hive before you can start your beekeeping business. If you have the right resources, you can make your own hive or probably purchase one from a successful beekeeper.

There are a lot of choices you can take to get your hobby beekeeping.

• You can get your bees from a natural hive. Many people do not like hive in their houses. You can ask them if you can get the bees in their place. They will surely give it to you for free. Some can even pay you for doing it.
• If you know the means, you can also buy a bee package. Beekeeping is one of the successful professions today. Many people are engaged in hobby beekeeping and so you have more chances of buying a bee package. Bee package is composed of a bunch of bees in a box with a queen find in another container. In this method, you have to wait for how many weeks before you can have a working hive because you are not so sure that your bees will like the queen you have bought.
• Aside from buying a bee package from a professional beekeeper, you can also get this from a bee trade such as NUC or Nuclear Hive. NUC is a small working hive which can be found from a cardboard box with 4 or 5 frames of bees. The difference of NUC from other bee package is that the queen has relation to the other bees. This way, you have more chances of having beekeeping success.

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Honey is very beneficial to us, especially when it is organic honey, un-filtered and raw. It is commonly used to heal burns and ease throat colds because it has many healing properties and can be used in many recipes and to sweeten foods and beverages. In addition to its antimicrobial qualities, it also can prevent scarring, and speed up the healing of tissue for diabetics wounds or sores. Diabetes typically worsens ulcers by making it more difficult for the body to heal and replace infected or dead tissue with healthy skin.

Natural state means it is untouched and not processed, so it comes directly from mother nature. Organic honey is free of preservatives, additives, and artificial colors or flavors and it is good for your body. Honey cannot be labeled certified organic if it has traces of chemicals, drugs or antibiotics and it must be produced, processed, and packaged in accordance with national or federal regulations. It also needs to be certified organic by the governing body or an independent organic farming certification organization.

Honeybees that live and collect nectar in clean colonies free of contaminants are the ones that produce the truly organic honey. Honeybee colonies are about 2 mile radius from their beekeepers location. This means that honeybees could easily pick up contaminants, such as chemicals, drugs and antibiotics in their environment around their colonies.

For example, to reduce diseases in honeybees that gather nectar, antibiotics and chemicals such as sulfa compounds are used by many beekeepers. Also carbolic acid is used to easily remove the honey from the hive. In some instances, even calcium cyanide is used by beekeepers to kill the bee colonies before extracting the honey. Honeybees living in non-organic colonies gather nectar from areas that have been sprayed with pesticides and other chemicals.

Therefore, to produce truly organic honey first the honeybees need to be in an environment free of additives and chemicals. Second its processing must be kept to a minimum and no additives should be used. When you filter honey you remove its beneficial properties and you can ultimately change the color, and the taste, which can affect your recipe or delay healing.

The most pure form is the unfiltered raw honey because filtering and processing includes adding other syrups and flavors and chemicals to modify its properties. During filtering and processing, most of the benefits are lost including its healing and antimicrobial properties. Even though it is put through ultra-filtration processes to remove chemicals, the end results is honey that no longer has its healing properties because it has been heavily diluted with water, boiled and filtered until it returns to a more natural consistency.

One of the advantages of authentic organic honey is that organic honeybee growers need to sustain the natural life cycle of bees by safeguarding their natural environment. Also, certifying the hive as organic is expensive so most beekeepers do not exterminate the bees at the end of the season, which is often a very common practice among conventional beekeepers.

For most of us, modern life has evolved far away from our roots in nature. Most of us live and work in a man-made, artificial environment. Very few of us have the advantage of working in a natural setting, and few of us even have the privilege of communing with nature on a regular basis.

 And yet, in spite of the barriers of modern civilization, which reduce our contact with the natural world, we all recognize the importance of nature. For the natural world is the bedrock upon which our artificial world of modern civilization rests. Though we may exist in an entirely artificial environment – leaving our air-conditioned homes to travel in air-conditioned vehicles to and from our workplace cubicle – we are just as dependent upon the workings of nature as a 17th century farmer who had to sweat in the sun and grub in the dirt for his living.

 For many of us, finding a way of reconnecting with nature provides a counterweight to the artificiality of modern life, giving a balance to our lives that seems missing without some means of communing with nature. Gardening and camping are examples of popular activities that provide an interface with nature. Another such activity that unfortunately is often overlooked is beekeeping.

 Beekeeping provides an intimate connection with nature. Watching your bees as they explode in population in the spring as they prepare for the summer’s honey production, and then winding down in the fall, ready to face the winter with the stores they’ve industriously accrued, is endlessly fascinating, no matter how many times you’ve watched the cycle repeated. And fortunately, it’s not necessary to live in the country to enjoy the hobby of beekeeping. Hundreds of hives are kept on the balconies and rooftops of most cities; there are even professional beekeepers whose hives are all located within the confines of a city.

 Of course, the production of honey is one of the major benefits of beekeeping. In most seasons, a well-managed hive will produce enough honey to allow its keeper to share in the bounty and still leave the hive plenty for winter stores. And the honey that the hobbyist beekeeper can produce is nothing like the over processed and over filtered substance sold as honey at most supermarkets. Those who have never tasted pure, unprocessed honey straight from the comb (or even better, still in the comb), will be truly delighted at their first taste of honey in its natural state. There is usually quite a demand for raw, local honey, providing a ready market for any beekeeper that wishes to expand the hobby into a part-time business.

 But there is more to beekeeping than the benefits that accrue directly to the beekeeper. Beekeepers – whether professionals with thousands of hives, or hobbyists with only a hive or two – also provide a critically valuable service to society. For a variety of reasons, some of which are not completely understood, feral, or wild honeybee colonies have been dying out in recent years, making beekeepers very important people. Agriculture is highly dependent upon the pollination provided by honeybees, with about a third of the food humans consume requiring pollination by bees. If the bees disappear, so does that food, making every honeybee colony – and every beekeeper – a valuable resource.

 Perhaps more than any other single activity or hobby, beekeeping offers an endlessly fascinating exposure to the workings of nature. And when considering the other benefits of beekeeping: the opportunity to produce nature’s purest and most delectable sweet, the chance to profit from the pastime for those who wish, and the important contribution made to society by those who care for such an important insect, it’s truly a shame that more people don’t pursue the intriguing hobby of beekeeping.