Honey Harvest and Extraction

Step 16 Fill 'em Up and Share!

Fill up your containers with honey.
Optional: Decorate them with labels and bows.
Mandatory: Share your honey with friends!

Comments

[Jonesy Boogieman]

I loved this instructable!  And the last picture, with the bee investigating the full honey jar, is so cute!  It's like he's putting his own stamp of approval on it! :)

Thanks for your work! 

[neighborhoodfruit]

Thanks! I had such a blast doing it. I agree, the picture with a bee is really precious. A fascinating thing I learned about the bees is that most of the bees (worker bees) are female, but they lack reproductive capacity. Only queen is in charge of reproduction for the entire colony.

[Jonesy Boogieman]

I want to try this pretty bad, and even found an instructable for building a honey extractor.  But I have to wait until I can do something in a more rural setting.  My wife is terrified of bees after a couple of bad experiences as a child.

I had thought the workers were all male.  That is so interesting that they're mostly female!  Sort of like an "Amazonian" system :)  My wife might appreciate that!

[Javin007]

Yep, the same goes with ants, too. Ants also are all female with only male "drones" around for mating. While it's true that the worker bees do not lay eggs in a healthy colony, it's not that they *can't* lay eggs. Nature has a rather sick sense of humor here. The queen bee is constantly emitting pheromones. The presence of the queen in the hive is what keeps the female bees from attempting to lay eggs themselves. If a hive loses its queen, the bees will immediately start feeding "royal jelly" to some of the most recently laid eggs in an attempt to raise another queen. (This also happens when the current queen gets too old to effectively do her job.) And this is where it gets weird. When a queen bee is not fertilized by a drone, she will lay "unfertilized" eggs that can only turn into drones. When she is fertilized, then she's capable of laying the female eggs that become the workers (or other queens depending on how they're fed.) The worker bees *are* in fact capable of laying eggs, but are *not* in fact capable of mating with the drones. So if a colony loses its queen for a significant amount of time, sometimes the bees will attempt to "fix" the problem themselves by laying eggs, but in the cruel twist of fate from nature, since they can't mate, all of the eggs they lay will become drones so the hive will ultimately die.