How honey is extracted
A traditional Slovenian breakfast is bread with butter and honey. We also stir honey into tea, reach for it when we have a cold and use it to sweeten all kinds of baking. It has become so ordinary that we no longer stop to ask where it comes from. We rarely realise that a single bee works its whole life to make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey. To fill one jar, bees would have to visit around 4 million flowers and fly a distance equal to four times around the equator. And between the bee visiting a flower and the honey we spread on our bread, there are still a few more steps.
On a flower, the bee collects nectar and stores it in its honey stomach, a special sac in front of its actual stomach. It then flies back to the hive and empties the sac into a honeycomb cell. When the cell is full, the bees seal it with beeswax. They then gather on the combs and fan their wings to circulate the air and keep the temperature high enough. This lets as much water as possible evaporate from the honey so that it can ripen. Once the combs are full, the beekeeper takes them out of the hive and uses a special uncapping fork to remove the wax caps the bees used to seal the cells. The combs then go into a honey extractor, which spins them so the honey runs out through a strainer into a container. The empty combs are returned to the hive.
Some people believe that taking honey harms the bees, because we take away the food they worked so hard for. The truth is that when a colony has too much honey, it becomes too strong. It then raises a new queen, and one strong colony splits into two weak ones. One stays in the hive, while the other flies off with the new queen to find a new home (this is called swarming). Such swarms often end up in the forest, where many of them don't survive because of harsh conditions and poor shelter from the weather. That is why beekeepers take the surplus honey, while always leaving enough in the hives at the end of the season for the bees to get through the winter.
Once the work is done, we pour the honey into jars, enjoy it, look after our health with it and use it in honey cosmetics.
