APICULTURE

Products

Honey

Beewax

Other products from bees

Value added products

Honey

Flowers nectar is a solution of sugars and other minor constituents that bees collect and concentrate into honey. Honeys contain a wide range of sugars, varying according to the nectar source, and small amounts of other substances such as minerals, vitamins, proteins and amino acids. The temperature in a nest near the honey storage area is usually about 35 °C. This temperature and the ventilation produced by fanning bees cause water to evaporate from the honey. When the water content is reduced to about 20 percent, the bees seal the cell with a wax capping. The honey is now considered "ripe" and will not ferment. In this way the bees prepare for themselves a concentrated food source packed in minimal space. It is free from problems of fermentation; therefore bacteria cannot grow in the honey and it will not deteriorate during storage. This food sustains the bees through periods when there are no flowers.

Honey

Pollen is a minor but important component of honey. It is carried to the nest and stored quite separately from nectar, but a few pollen grains inevitably find their way into nectar and eventually into the honey. If the pollen in honey is identified through a microscope, it gives a guide to the plants on which the bees have been foraging.

Honey quality

The aroma, taste and colour of honey are determined by the plants from which the bees have gathered nectar. Sunflowers, for example, give a golden yellow honey; clover gives a sweet, white honey; a gave species give honey a bitter taste that is popular in some societies. Dark honey usually has a strong flavour and often has a high mineral content; pale honey has a more delicate flavour. The popularity of dark and light honey varies from country to country. Colour can also indicate quality, because honey becomes darker during storage or if it is heated. However, some perfectly fresh and unheated kinds of honey can be dark in colour.

Glucose is a major constituent of honey. When the glucose crystallizes, the honey becomes solid and is known as granulated honey. Depending on the plants the bees are visiting, some kinds of honey are more prone to granulation than others; almost all honey granulates if its temperature falls below 15-24 °C. As with colour, different people favour different qualities of honey. Some prefer granulated honey, while others choose liquid honey. Granulation is a natural process; there is no difference in nutritional value between solid and liquid honey. Some kinds of honey look cloudy because they contain a high level of pollen. Such honey is sometimes said to be of low quality, although the presence of pollen makes the honey even more nutritious. In Europe and North America, a new market is developing for honey that has been cold-filtered and not processed to remove all pollen.

Water content

If the water content of honey is greater than 23 percent, the honey is likely to ferment. Low water content is therefore important. Water content can be measured using a honey refractometer, which is a small instrument that measures the refraction of light as it passes through a glass prism on which a few drops of honey have been smeared. In climates with high humidity where it can be difficult to retain low water content in honey, airtight plastic buckets with lids are essential for honey storage.

Uses of honey

Honey has value as a food, as a medicine, as a cash crop for both domestic and export markets and as an important part of some cultural traditions.

As a food: Honey is valued everywhere as a sweet and tasty food. At times of food shortage it is a useful carbohydrate source that contains trace elements and adds nutritional diversity to poor diets. Honey often has an important place in traditional food preparation.

As a medicine or tonic: In many parts of the world, honey is used as a medicine or tonic and as a special treat for children. Modern medicine is increasingly using honey for a variety of treatments.

As a cash crop: Fresh local honey is always more highly valued than imported honey. Many beekeepers sell their product directly to consumers. Honey is often used as a barter commodity in villages, especially in remote areas or areas isolated by war or sanctions. Honey is a stable commodity with a long shelf life. If harvested carefully, it will remain wholesome for many years.

As an export crop: As standards of living rise, honey consumption increases. Most industrialized countries import honey to meet demand. This requirement can provide developing countries with a useful source of foreign exchange from honey exports. The countries with the highest honey exports are Mexico, China and Argentina. Because beekeeping does not use land, production of honey for export need not conflict with growing crops for local consumption.

Beeswax

Candles from beewax

Beeswax quality

Beeswax is valued according to its purity and colour. Light-coloured wax is more highly valued than dark-coloured wax, because dark wax is likely to have been contaminated or overheated. The finest beeswax is from wax cappings, which are the wax seals with which bees cover ripe honeycombs. This new wax is pure and white. The presence of pollen turns it yellow.

Income from beeswax

For several reasons beeswax is an excellent commodity for rural communities to use as a cash or export crop.

• Beeswax processing is easy. Rendering beeswax to a quality suitable for export involves only simple heating and filtering methods to ensure that the beeswax is clean. It can be moulded into blocks using any suitably sized containers as moulds. The blocks are broken into small pieces to assure buyers that the beeswax is pure and clean.
• Transport and storage of beeswax is simple, because no special packaging is required. Beeswax is normally exported as small unwrapped lumps in hessian sacks.
• Beeswax does not deteriorate with age. Individual beekeepers or cooperatives can store small amounts until they have enough to sell.
• As with honey, beeswax can be considered an appropriate export crop for developing countries, because beekeeping does not use land required for local food production.
• In areas where most or all of the honey produced is consumed locally and where there is no major local use for beeswax, honeycombs are often discarded, even though they could provide additional income. Beekeepers sometimes need to be trained in methods of rendering and saving beeswax, and encouraged to sell their combined crop in one transaction.

Uses of beeswax

Beeswax has many traditional uses. In some countries in Asia and Africa, it is used in creating batik fabrics and in the lost-wax method of casting small metal objects. Beeswax is widely used as a waterproofing agent for wood and leather, and for strengthening threads; it is used in village industries such as candle-making and as an ingredient in ointments, medicines, soaps and polishes. Beeswax is in great demand on the world market. There are more than 300 industrial uses for beeswax.

Cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries are the major users, accounting for 70 percent of the world trade, and require first-class beeswax that has not been overheated. Other significant users are the beekeeping industries in industrialized countries that need beeswax for cosmetic foundations and for candle-making. Beeswax is used in the manufacture of electronic components and CDs, in modelling and casting for industry and art, in polishes for shoes, furniture and floors, in grafting waxes and in specialized industrial lubricants.

Industrialized countries use frame hives for beekeeping. Empty honeycombs are returned to the hive after the extraction of honey, which means that relatively little beeswax is harvested. With frame hives, the ratio of honey to beeswax production is approximately 75:1. Honey hunting or the use of traditional or top-bar hives results in greater yields of beeswax, however, the delicate honeycomb is broken during the extraction of honey and cannot be returned to the nest or hive. The ratio of honey to beeswax production using these hives is about 10:1. For this reason countries in Africa, Asia and Central and South America produce large amounts of beeswax, which can provide a valuable export crop.

Other products from bees

Pollen

Pollen is valued as a health food; some people believe that it can help to combat allergies. It contains 30 percent protein, 30 percent carbohydrate, 5percent fat and many minor constituents, so it is a potentially useful source of nutrition. Pollen is relatively simple to harvest from frame hives using a trap fitted to the hive entrance. When the bees pass through the trap, a grid knocks the pollen out of the pollen baskets on their back legs and it falls into a tray, from which it is collected. Pollen prices are high in Europe and East Asia.

Propolis

Honeybees collect resins and gums from buds or injured areas of plants. This glue-like substance, usually dark brown in colour, is called propolis. As with honey, propolis differs in composition according to the plants from which bees have been collecting. Honeybees use propolis to keep their homes dry, draught proof, secure and hygienic. Propolis is used to seal up any cracks where micro-organisms could flourish; its volatile oils must serve as a kind of antiseptic air-freshener. Bees use propolis:

• as building material to decrease the size of nest entrances and to make the surface smooth for passing bee traffic;
• to varnish inside brood cells before a queen lays eggs in them, providing a strong, waterproof and hygienic unit for developing larvae;
• to embalm the bodies of mice or other predators too large for bees to eject from the nest, which would otherwise decay and be a source of infection.

The Apis florea, one of the Asian honeybee species, uses rings of propolis like bands of grease to coat the branch from which its single-comb nest is suspended as a protection from predators. Propolis has long been used as a medicine; it has been proved scientifically that propolis kills bacteria. It is a common ingredient in toothpaste, soaps and ointments. Dissolving propolis in alcohol makes a tincture with many claimed medicinal properties. For beekeepers in remote areas, access to markets is more of a problem than harvesting the product.

Royal jelly

Royal jelly is the food that worker bees give to freshly hatched larvae. It contains many insect growth hormones and is valued as a medicine, tonic or aphrodisiac in various parts of the world. Royal jelly has many different components including proteins, sugars, fats, minerals and vitamins.
Under natural conditions, a larva destined to become a queen bee develops in a special large wax cell, inside which worker bees place large amounts of royal jelly. Honeybee colonies can be manipulated by beekeepers to start producing great numbers of queens, perhaps 50 or more, specifically to produce royal jelly for harvest. Worker bees produce vast amounts of royal jelly -extra sugar must be fed to the colony to achieve this - and place it in the queen cells. Instead of feeding on it and developing into queen bees, the larvae are removed and the royal jelly is harvested by beekeepers.

Harvesting royal jelly and its subsequent processing and packaging call for skilled techniques of honeybee colony manipulation and sophisticated technology. Royal jelly deteriorates quickly after harvest and must be kept frozen or freeze-dried during handling, storage, transport and marketing. The main countries harvesting royal jelly commercially are China, Taiwan and Thailand. The main market for royal jelly is Japan; relatively small amounts are imported by other industrialized countries.

Value-added products

It is easy to make profits from beeswax by manufacturing ointments or cosmetics. It is essential to work in hygienic conditions, and to have good knowledge of the ingredients and products and access to small containers for packaging and marketing. Making wax candles may be the easiest way to increase profits from harvested beeswax. In developing countries with tourist industries, batik art and small metal ornaments made by lost-wax casting - both processes use beeswax - can create livelihoods for artisans. For more about value added products from beekeeping visit the link below.

For more http://www.fao.org/docrep/w0076e/w0076e00.htm