bee ball
High quality bee products from the bee ball
In addition to hurled honey, the bee ball can also be used to harvest high-quality honeycomb honey and Viking honey.
Honey production
The honey bee sucks up the nectar from the flower with its proboscis and stores it in the honey bladder. When the nectar is sucked in, the first of many process steps begins to transform the nectar into storable honey. When the honey bladder is full, the bee flies back into the beehive. There the honey / nectar is passed from the flying bee to the hive bee. The hive bee stores the honey around the 35 ° C brood nest. This has the advantage that the bees can find food and heating material in the vicinity of the brood nest. In addition, the moist nectar is dried by the warmth of the brood nest. The warm, humid air enriched with propolis resulting from the drying of the honey is fanned out of the entrance hole by the bees. The honey can only be kept with a water content of 18-19%. After drying, some of the honey is carried into the honey room.
In the bee ball, the bees are able to reduce the water content in honey by about 1-2% more than in magazine hives. Long-term measurements showed that the stick temperature can be kept constant due to the round shape. Compared to magazine hives, the corners act as cold or heat bridges, these are subject to the external climatic influence. The cooling of the outside temperature at night has an impact on the honey quality, but also on the incubation temperature. Elements for humidity and heat regulation are integrated in the bee ball.
The heat and humidity control lid can be used for the honey space in the magazine hive. This newly developed lid enables the bees to dry the honey even in bad weather periods.
Hurled honey
With the invention of the middle wall production and the honey extractor about 100 years ago, extracted honey can be produced today. Today it is mainly the centrifuged honey that is consumed . In the production of centrifuged honey, wired frames with artificially created wax dividers are hung in the honey room for the bees. The bees build the honeycomb cells with their 8 wax glands. Wax is a 100% bee product.
If necessary, the bee can activate the wax glands by absorbing honey and build the individual wax cells by fusing the individual wax platelets. The honey is stored in these empty wax cells. When 2/3 of the honeycomb cells are covered, the honeycomb can be harvested. As a rule, you take a decapping fork or a heated knife and remove the capping wax. Now the honeycomb can be thrown and the honey flows through a sieve into the honey pot or bucket. Most types of honey crystallize within 2-3 days. Therefore, the honey must be filled into jars immediately, otherwise it will have to be reheated, stirred and then filled into jars at a later point in time. The hurled honeycombs can then be hung back into the bee colony and used over and over again for several years.
As an alternative to spinning, you can uncover the honeycomb and let the honey drip into a container. (For small quantities). Or you can squeeze out the honeycomb.