When you’re out driving in the country and you’ve seen tall white wooden columns tucked in the corner of a pumpkin patch or clover meadow or alfalfa field, you’ve known you’re looking at a colony of honey bees.
Farmers and apiarists may be one and the same, or they may have a symbiotic relationship — the bees pollinate the crops for the farmer and the bees produce honey for the apiarist.
Each wooden column is composed of a number of boxes. One of the boxes, the brood chamber, is the queen bee’s domain — where she lays up to 2000 eggs per day.
The other boxes, or supers, are filled with frames for storing honey.
Each hexagonal cell of this frame is filled with honey and capped with a thin layer of wax.
In order to access the honey, the top layer of wax is removed — called de-capping — with a specially designed hot knife.
Cells that have been missed by the hot knife can also be scratched open with a comb.
The hot wax falls off the frame and into a tub and can later be melted down for other uses.
With both sides decapped, the frames are placed in an extractor.
When filled with frames the extractor spins (by either electrical or human power) and centrifugal force draws the honey from the cells where it hits the sides of the drum and then runs down to the bottom.
And out it flows, golden, aromatic and absolutely irresistible to the human finger tip!
Now the frames are empty and light, each hexagonal cell a ready repository for more of the bees’ labours, and are replaced in the super and returned to the hive.
All is calm and well with the world once more.
Tomorrow: Can you ever have too much money honey?
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The Country Mice 