HONEY

Honey the most outstanding and popular product from bee keeping practice can be described as a sparkling viscous golden liquid ranging from pale yellow to dark brown in colour that shows thousands of liquid glitters readily mixing in the liquid honey when bend to a side at intervals in the containing glass bottle .

The variance in colour depends on some factors which include the plants' nectars,pollen and juices collected by the bees in a particular geographical area ranging from state to state in a country as well as from different countries of the world.Another factor is the age of the matured honey before harvesting and finally the specie of the bees that constitutes colonies that produced all these honey varieties .

As stated above ,honey principally is produced by the bees by gathering nectars ,pollen and juices from various plants as well as collecting water from sources available in the immediate environment  and neighbourhood  of their apiaries or  in the wild where they have found holes in trees  or crevasses of rocks and mountains .

The typical example of this can be found in African villages where bees does a lot of landing at the marshy banks of streams and small rivers for the main water collection.

The unique way and the technicality with which the bees goes about collecting the ingredients and making the world best sensational “sweet” in quote and the fact of more people becoming Beekeepers across  genders is divine and rightly entrenched in the Glorious Al’Quran in Surah An-Nahl (chapter 16 verses 68 and 69.An –Nahl in Arabic means the bee.

  This verses in quote are “And your Lord inspired the bees saying take your habitations in the mountains and in the trees and in what they erect .Then eat of all fruits, and follow the ways of your Lord made easy for you. There comes forth from their bellies a drink of varying colour where in is healing for men .Verily,in this is indeed a sign for people who think “.                
Three marvellous things in these verses are :

1 The commandment and full explanation on how the bees should go about the duty of gathering their ingredients from plants and the definite  assurance from our Creator that the end result of their activities is going to become sweet and healing for humanity.

2 The pre knowledge information that various honey collections will come in varying colours so as not to confuse mankind and bring about misunderstanding on the colour  variance.

3 Another information passed is the fact that human beings men and women are going to become professional Beekeepers can rightly be deduced from the statement “and in what they erect.” Erection hear simply means the provision of hives  and keeping bees in them . The above points derived from these verses are pointers to the fact that the all knowing and one who  bestow  knowledge is Allah our Creator.

There are claims that bee keeping has been in practice over the centuries before now , but the fact is that what was in place was just  honey collection and consumption for its sweetness and the little knowledge of its medicinal values then unlike the broadened and diversified knowledges now .

The real intuition into serious beekeeping and the research works  in the insect bee is an effort that could not be more than a thousand years. The caste of  bees  that does this lofty job on regular basis are called foragers. They store their collection in a special sacs by the sides of their hind legs known as pollen sacs which will latter be deposited to the worker bees another caste in the family whose principal job is to work on the collected, nectars and juices and start the process of turning them into honey as well as tender  the eggs from the queen ,take care of young ones to adulthood and defend their hives and the entire  immediate territories from vandals and intruders.

The collections are now made wet by the worker bees through the action known as regurgitation into special made containers  known as honey combs with hexagonal shaped cells so that the young honey  will not flow out or evaporate .

The fresh wet deposits will later become the honey everybody crave for.The maturity process begins when the bees produces thin layers of wax membrane and seal each cell, when this among special jobs in the chain is completed ,the next line of action is the fanning by the worker bees using their wings to regulate the heat the liquid honey requires to get to maturity and the honey could remain in the hive as long as the Beekeeper want it to remain and similar untapped honey conditions happens in the cases of bee colonies in the holes of trees and in crevasses of rocks and in the mountains. Beekeepers would normally harvest his honey for the monetary gains as soon as it is matured for the purpose .

Honey harvesting requires special training so as not to destroy the lot of antibiotics ,minerals ,antiseptics and nutrients that are to be of goodness to mankind  in the honey .Beekeepers are the ideal people for this special duty who can harvest honey in professional manners that will not allow impurities into the honey unlike the crude manners with which the wild honey comb hunters goes about their own practice of serious fire works which in turn leaves their collections with the and odour of burnt honey.

Doing this requires appropriate materials and working tools such as                        

1.Bee suit 2.Veile 3.Hand harvesting gloves 4.Harvesting  tools and

5.harvesting  smoker, on the other hand, besides the above tools, there is the need for stainless bucket to contain the honey in the case of top bar hive whereby everything is harvested including  honey and wax all in the comb which will be separated later by beekeepers who also extract wax .

In the case of framed bar hives like dandant and langstroth hives, a special equipment known as tangential extractor  is needed to bring out the honey only and return the framed bars to the bees in their hives for instant restuffing since the combs remain intact in the framed bars.

The advantage of framed bar hives is that they allow multiple harvesting during the honey flow period,and  the advantage of top bar hives is that they allow honey harvesting and wax extraction which is one of the by-products of beekeeping.

Our next class will be on the numerous medical uses of honey which no one individual can claim to know all about honey uses .The by-products information will follow in sequence .

Info at: solacehoney.blogspot.com,solacehoney@gmail.com,+2348032800119,+2348127062706.