BEESWAX PRODUCTION

Bees produce beeswax by synthesizing the sugars in honey.  The worker bee’s wax glands mature  around her second week of  life as  an adult and are situated on her lower
abdomen. The wax appears as  a clear liquid,  cools and turns white,  forming a small wax scale or flake.  The workers can produce this  in very large quantities. 

In the hive,  they often link together into chains and clusters between the combs,  which helps them to  maintain a temperature of  about 35° C (96° F)  in order to  produce wax. After clustering for around 24 hours,  the small wax scales are secreted.

Uses
Wax is the bees’  basic house-building unit.  It is often mixed with some propolis for strength and,  without it,  a colony could not exist.  It  takes over 7 kg (15 lb) of  honey to  produce 1 kg (2 lb) of  wax,  and so you can see that,  if  you take away  the beeswax at  harvest time for sale as  comb  honey,  the bees will need to  use up a large amount of  honey to  replace it. 

It  becomes a matter of  working out what  will make the most money for the beekeeper – selling honey alone and preserving  the wax for a good harvest the next year or a second harvest in year one,  or selling more  expensive comb honey and letting the bees use up valuable honey in replacing it. 

It  is estimated that  a standard Langstroth frame of  comb can hold up to  3.8 kg (8¼ lb) of  honey.  The wax necessary to  hold this weighs only 100 g (3½ oz).  Each  wax scale produced by a honeybee weighs about 1 mg, which means that  nearly  one million are needed to  make 1 kg (2 lb) of  wax,  and approximately 9 x 105 of  these little scales are needed to  make sufficient wax for a normal bee colony.  Work  it out!

Composition
The  composition  of  beeswax  is  complex,  but  it  contains  hydrocarbons,  straight-chain monohydric alcohols,  acids,  hydroxy acids,  oils and other substances.  Its specific gravity is less  than one,  so it floats on water.  It  melts  at  63–65° C (145–149º  F)  and solidifies at 60–63° C (140–145º  F),  depending on its purity.

Wax is normally a by-product for beekeepers and,  as  a guide,  for each  60 kg (130 lb) of  honey extracted from the hive,  about 1  kg  (2 lb) of  beeswax is produced.  This comes from the cappings of  the honeycomb,  which are removed during the honey-extraction process.

PROPERTIES OF HONEY

Honey has many determinative properties but,  for the average beekeeper who wants to sell honey,  the important ones are as follows:

Hard or soft (liquid honey)
Most honeys eventually crystallize,  but the rate of  crystallization depends on the ratio of  glucose  to  fructose  in  the  honey,  and  that  depends  mainly  on  the  floral  source.  Some honey,  such as  that from oilseed rape (canola),  often crystallizes on the comb while still in the hive,  making it very difficult for the bees to use as stores and difficult for the beekeeper to  extract using standard equipment. To  the beekeeper,  honey viscosity is very important,  especially during extraction and packing. Larger companies will heat their honey so that  it flows through their equipment more readily and can be packed in  jars or drums easily. 
Some honeys may be thixotropic,  which means they become jelly-like if  left undisturbed.

Taste
The taste of  honey varies enormously.  It depends on the flowering plants the honeybees foraged on. Try some clover honey and then some citrus honey and you will find a huge difference.

Colour
Colour  shouldn’t  be  an  issue  really  but,  in  fact,  in  some  countries  such as Nigeria,  the  USA and Germany,  it is very much  a determinant of  price. 
The  Americans prefer their honey  ‘water white’,  and dark honeys are referred to as  ‘bakers’  honey’  and command a lower price.
In Nigeria, honey consumers prefer golden yellow colour as being genuine while dark coloured honey are seen as being inferior or of lesser quality. In  Germany,  dark honey is preferred,  and pale or white honeys are lower in price. 

Antibacterial quality
Honey’s  ‘hyper-osmotic’  nature  (due to  the high concentration of  solids and low moisture content) prevents the growth  of  bacteria and yeasts as  this draws water out of the organisms,  killing them by desiccation.  It  literally  sucks them dry. 
Consumers of honey mix up this attribute when it comes to ascertaining the quality of honey.
Original honey, when it has not been exposed to moisture through opening, can kill ants because of its hyper-osmotic nature. That is the reason when you pour some quantity of honey on any object, the ants will gather near it but will not be able to taste it. If they move closer, the honey will "magnetise" them and they will die in the honey content because of this hyper-osmotic nature.
Do you know what the ants will do? They will wait for some time for the honey to gather moisture from the atmosphere to dilute it, they then start licking the honey.

Honey is acidic. This plays an important role in the system that  prevents bacterial growth. The pH of  honeys may vary from approximately 3.2 to 4.5 (average pH = 3.9),  making it inhospitable for attack  by most,  but not all,  bacteria. Honey also has its own antibacterial substance in its make-up.  Bees add an enzyme called glucose oxidase to  honey,  and this enzyme reacts with  glucose to  produce hydrogen peroxide and gluconic acid,  both of  which have  an antibacterial effect.

Like most products of  the hive,  honey is essentially a by-product of  the all-important pollination process.  The value of  honey in the economy of  the major honey-producing nations is far less than the value of  pollination,  but there is a huge global trade in honey and many beekeepers can make a very decent living by producing good honey either in bulk or packaged for sale.

COMPOSITION OF HONEY

COMPOSITION OF HONEY

Being a natural product,  honey varies in composition enormously but,  essentially,  it is  a fluid,  viscous or crystallized substance,  produced by bees from the nectar of  blossoms that  bees collect,  transform or combine with  substances of  their own,  which they then store and leave to  mature.

Its main components are water and sucrose.  Sucrose is composed of  glucose and fructose, and it is the glucose-to-fructose ratio that  determines some of  honey’s most noticeable physical characteristics,  such as  how long it will  take to  crystallize,  for example.  Water is always  present in honey,  and the amount is critical to  the beekeeper when processing or storing extracted honey.

The beekeeper should always  check their  honey to  ensure that  this moisture/water presence is within bounds. The moisture/water content should be less than 19% in other to meet international standard for quality honey. The more reason a beekeeper should not expose harvested honey to moisture because honey is hygroscopic in nature. It can easily attract and absorb moisture. Hence, it should be stored in an airtight container.

A more detailed definition of  the composition of  honey would be as  follows:

• Honey is composed mainly of  sugars and water. 
• The average honey is 79.6% sugar and 17.2% water. The main sugars are fructose (38.2%) and glucose (31.3%). 
• Other sugars include maltose (7.3%) and sucrose (1.3%). 
• Honey also contains acids (.57%),  protein (.26%),  a small amount of  minerals (.17%) and a number of  other minor components,  including pigments,  flavour and aroma substances, colloids and vitamins.  This  group of  materials constitutes about 2.2% of  the total composition.

It should be noted that the sugars mentioned here are natural because honeybees obtained them from flowering plants and not the same with synthetic sugar being used in homes.

Importance of beekeeping and its challenges in Nigeria

Importance of Beekeeping

• Bee farming is a rewarding and enjoyable occupation which has many benefits to the bee farmers and the returns are high. It has more advantages over other farm enterprises.
• Bee farming requires little land which does not have to be fertile.
• Honey is a source of non-perishable food hence last longer.
• Capital needed to investment is very low compared to other farm enterprises.
• Beekeeping or bee farming is cheap and relatively not competitive to other Agricultural enterprises. It does not compete for scarce resources such as space.
• Labor required in bee farming is very low for activities such as inspections and harvesting.
• Many products can be obtained from bee farming which are great source of income. Examples of these products are honey, beeswax, pollen, bee venom, royal jelly, bee colonies, bee brood, queen bees, and package bees.
• Bee farming encourages environmental conservation since it does not cause any pollution and since bees require plant, there is a tendency to conserve cutting trees.
• Bees act as good pollinators of plants, trees, fruits and crops, thus playing a big role in bio-diversity and improvement of crop yields in our country.
• most hive products provide remedy for a number of ailments (Apitherapy) and can cure many disease.

Challenges Facing Production of Honey in Nigeria

• Lack of skills is a major challenge facing this sector. Most farmers in Nigeria lack adequate skills on managing bees and handling hive products.
• Also Inadequate training for both farmers and extension staff is also a challenge facing this sector.
• Limited   access to appropriate beekeeping equipment is among the challenges facing bee farming in Nigeria.
• Another challenge facing this sector is underdeveloped marketing system of hive products both locally and internationally. This can be due to problems of quality and marketing organizations.
• Lack of adequate and intense research on the existing beekeeping technologies, equipment, honey bee and product utilization is also a main challenge facing bee farming in Nigeria.
• Low prioritization of beekeeping in relation to other enterprises in the wider Agricultural sector has also been a problem facing this sector because they get less funds from the government.

For further information, contact ALAKE BEE FARM on ±2348033696345.

MODERN BEEKEEPING

A beekeeper is someone who is not only engaged in a hobby or business but also someone who (by design or not) is taking an active part in protecting the future of the planet. This sounds dramatic but in fact is true.

Bees, unlike other livestock, do not need constant attention. They will go out each day and get on with it whether you are there or not. If you devote one day in ten to them with occasional bursts of more attention when required and during the harvest, you would be able to keep bees satisfactorily, and this is, in the main, for only part of the year.

During the winter months you can leave them alone completely unless something dramatic happens, such as flooding or lightning strikes.

Most commercial beekeepers who make their living from bees started out as hobbyists. Some specialize in honey production,  others  in pollination services to  farmers;  others specialize in rearing queen bees for sale;  and yet others specialize in other hive products, such as beeswax,  pollen,  propolis or royal jelly.  There is even a large and profitable market in bee venom.  Some graduate into apitherapy – a very effective alternative type of  healing that is  fast becoming mainstream medicine.  Mead,  honey or propolis  soap, face creams and so on are all side-lines for the imaginative beekeeper.

Other beekeepers devote  their efforts to  breeding the  ‘perfect’  bee:  a calm,  gentle, disease-resistant,  productive  creature.  Despite the fact  that  a male bee or drone has no father (which complicates the issue),  breeding success is often claimed to  be at  hand. And then there are the professional itinerant beekeepers  who make a living by hiring themselves out to large commercial outfits all over the world.  These young men and women travel the world moving  from one hemisphere to  the other according to  the seasons,  using their beekeeping skills to pick up the many jobs available in commercial beekeeping.