Welcome to B'S HONEY page. We raise our own bees and sell the honey. We have found that a lot of people are afraid of bees and misunderstand them. I thought it would be nice to find out from someone who is a beekeeper all about bees.

The Colony The hive consists of the Queen bee who lays all the bees in individual cells and the worker bees tend to the young. When the larva are ready to morph the cell is capped until the bee is formed. The Queen mates with the drones on her maiden flight when she is still a virgin. That is the only purpose of the drone. Drones are bigger than worker bees and don't have stingers. They eat enormous amounts of honey and are pushed out of the hive in the fall to die. When I was young I knew the drones from the workers and I liked to play with the drones when they crawled outside of the hive. The three cast of the hive are the queen, workers and drones. All workers are female. It depends on the combination of foods the worker bees feed the larva whether they become workers or queens or drones. The queens are fed more royal jelly than worker bees.

The Queen Bee There is only one Queen Bee per hive. Whenever more Queen Bees are born there is a fight with the old Queen and the new Queen usually wins. The old Queen takes a group of bees with her and they "swarm" out of the hive and land somewhere while scout bees try to search out a nice safe place to live. Some bees find cracks in houses or other buildings and nest there. Some settle in hollow trees or other unusual places. When bees swarm they are not as likely to sting as when they are guarding their home. My father has shown us how to gather a swarm of bees by placing a brood box below the bees and shaking the bees off of the tree limb into the box. If the queen falls into the box the other worker bees follow. The bees are very docile.

Smoking Bees I like to smoke the bees. (It causes some interesting looks whenever I say that.) Like the lion tamer uses the whip to subdue the lion the beekeeper knows that to subdue the bees he has to use smoke. A smoker is a contraption made of metal with a billows attached. Some people burn burlap to create a smoldering fire but since we live in Georgia and have so many pine trees we like to use pine needles. The smell is like a camp fire. The smoke should be a cool white smoke with no heat or flame coming out. It is best to smoke the entrance of the bee hive and give them a minute for the smoke to affect them. Bees natural instinct is to eat the honey whenever they smell smoke. It must be natures way to save the honey in case of a fire. The smoke covers the smell of the pheramones that the bees emit and prevents the bees from signaling to attact and sting the intruder.

The Sweet Reward The good part about raising bees is the reward of the pure golden honey. Extracting the honey is not an easy or inexpensive job. The old fashion way is to take the frames out and cut the capping off and strain the honey through cheesecloth. We are fortunate to have an extractor which holds two frames at a time. It is a manual drum with a crank handle to turn the frames and sling the honey out of the honey cells. We have to turn the frames around and then sling out the other side. It uses centrifugal force. That is much easier than squeezing the honey through cloth. We can put the honey in clean jars and label them and then sale them.