Honey Harvest, Types of Honey, and Beeswax - How Bees Make Liquid Gold

Bees have been making honey for about 150 million years. Let that number sit for a moment. They were doing this long before humans showed up and decided to take some for ourselves.

Chapter 8 of Backyard Farming: Keeping Honey Bees by Kim Pezza covers how honey is made, the different types you can get, and how beeswax fits into the picture. This is the chapter where all the work you have put into your hive starts to pay off.

Honey Through History

Honey has been a big deal for a very long time. In some periods of history, it was worth more than currency. The ancient Egyptians used it for embalming and placed jars of honey inside pharaoh tombs. The stuff they found in those tombs thousands of years later? Still edible. We will come back to that.

In ancient Greece, honey was prized as food and medicine. Spain has cave paintings dating back to around 7000 BCE that show early beekeeping. Those are considered some of the earliest records we have of humans working with bees.

In 11th century Germany, peasants paid their feudal lords in honey and beeswax. It was that valuable. Honey held its status as a primary sweetener until sugar started gaining ground in the late 17th century. Once sugar became cheap and widely available, honey took a back seat. But it never went away.

How Bees Actually Make Honey

The process is pretty remarkable when you break it down.

Forager bees go out and gather nectar from flowers. That nectar goes into the bee’s honey stomach, which is a second stomach separate from its regular digestive system. While the nectar is in there, enzymes start breaking it down and thickening it.

Back at the hive, the forager deposits the thickened nectar into honeycomb cells. Then the water content evaporates over time, and what is left is honey. The bees cap each cell with wax once the honey is ready.

Simple concept. Incredible execution.

What Makes Honey So Special

Honey contains sugars, minerals, amino acids, vitamins, and antioxidants. Kim Pezza points out that it is the only food known to include everything needed to sustain life, including water.

Here is the wild part. Honey never spoils. Bacteria literally cannot grow in it. If your honey crystallizes, that does not mean it has gone bad. Just gently reheat it and it goes right back to liquid form.

Remember those pharaoh tombs from ancient Egypt? The honey found inside was still perfectly good to eat after thousands of years. That is not an exaggeration. That is a fact.

The Numbers Are Humbling

A single bee produces about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime. That is it. One twelfth.

To make a single pound of honey, bees need to visit roughly 2 million flowers. So every jar of honey on your shelf represents an unbelievable amount of work by thousands of bees over their whole lives.

Types of Honey

Not all honey is the same. The type depends on what nectar source the bees are working with. Some common varieties include orange blossom, clover, buckwheat, and wildflower.

The color ranges from very light (almost clear) to very dark (almost black). The flavor changes too. Clover honey is mild and sweet. Buckwheat honey is strong and earthy. Wildflower honey varies depending on what is blooming in your area.

If you have ever wondered about organic honey, here is the catch. It is extremely rare and hard to certify. You cannot control where your bees fly. They forage within a radius of several miles, and you have no way to guarantee that every flower they visit is on organic land. So take “organic honey” labels with a grain of salt.

How Honey Is Sold

You will find honey sold in several forms:

• Liquid - the classic runny honey most people are familiar with
• Granulated or crystallized - honey that has naturally solidified
• Creamed - honey that has been processed to have a smooth, spreadable texture
• Cut-comb - actual pieces of honeycomb sold as-is
• Chunk - liquid honey with chunks of comb inside

A Warning About Store-Bought Honey

This is worth paying attention to. A lot of commercial honey has had the pollen filtered out of it. That filtering removes a lot of the beneficial properties and also makes it impossible to trace where the honey came from.

Even worse, some store-bought honey has corn syrup mixed in. Chinese honey in particular can be up to 40% corn syrup. You are literally paying for honey and getting sugar water.

This is one of the best reasons to keep your own bees or buy from local beekeepers. You know exactly what you are getting.

Beeswax

Beeswax is produced by worker bees through eight wax glands on their abdomen. The bees need to maintain a temperature between 91 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit to produce it.

Fresh beeswax starts out white and gradually turns yellow or brown over time. The numbers on wax production are wild. About 1,000 wax scales make just 1 gram of beeswax. And it takes approximately 10 pounds of honey to produce just 1 pound of wax. So beeswax is not something bees make casually. It costs them a lot of energy.

Harvesting Wax

You collect beeswax during the honey harvest. When you uncap the honeycomb frames to extract honey, those cappings are your wax source. You can also use the crush-and-squeeze method, where you crush the entire comb and squeeze the honey out.

Once you have separated the wax from the honey, let it cool. Then re-melt it, strain out any debris, and pour it into a mold to harden. Clean beeswax is useful for all kinds of things, which we will cover in the next chapter.

Cut-Comb Honey

If you want to sell or use honeycomb directly, cut-comb honey is the way to go. You take a frame of capped honeycomb, cut it into pieces, and sell or serve it as-is. People love it. There is something satisfying about eating honey straight from the comb.

A Tip on Gentle Bees

Kim Pezza mentions something practical here. Raise gentle bees. It makes harvest time so much easier.

You can test for gentleness by observing how your bees react when you open the hive. Some colonies stay calm. Others get defensive fast. Bees also tend to be better mannered at certain times of day and in certain weather conditions.

If your colony is consistently aggressive, consider re-queening with a gentler stock. Your future self, standing over an open hive with a hot knife and no patience for drama, will thank you.

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