We should and have to feel lucky, as bees make more honey than their colony needs. Beekeepers are able to remove the excess and jar it. We have known about it since the beginning of our conscious life and written history.

Beginning of honey is happening by bees collecting nectar, which gets broken down into simple structures like sugar stored inside the honeycomb (which happens to be built naturally by our little friends). The design of honeycomb and fanning of the bees’ wings causes evaporation, creating sweet liquid honey. Honey’s colour and flavour is based on the nectar collected by the bees. Sometimes you have seen bee hives somewhere and thought to yourself – why have bee hives been left there without any supervision. The simplest answer would be to get a certain type of nectar. Let’s say, if a beekeeper decides he wants to have a certain type of honey (like orange blossom), he will have to make it easier to gather it as bees, the same as we – we like when things are getting simple. So that is what the beekeeper does – it makes bees’ lives simple by placing them in the place where the nectar can be collected easily. By the way, honey from orange blossoms is light in colour, but varieties darker comes for instance from wildflowers, forrest blossoms. The colour might be going then towards dark brown and the density of it might be very different as well.

On average one hive will produce about 55 pounds (that is about 25kg). Honey is harvested by beekeepers by collecting honeycomb frames and scraping off the wax cap that bees make to seal off honey in each cell. Once caps are removed – there are special extractors which spin the centrifuge. This way honey is forced to go out of the comb.

After extraction, honey is strained to remove any remaining wax, pollen and other particles. Some beekeepers are heating up the honey to make this process easier, but if done right – it doesn’t alter the liquid’s natural composition.