About Bees

The “industriousness of the bees” is unbeatable. What the small, busy insects do in their short lives is remarkable:

• they pollinate about 80% of all flowers
• they visit about 250-500 flowers of the same variety per trip and need about 15-30 minutes
• cover a distance of around 100,000 km for the production of 1 kg of honey
• a bee colony visits up to 50 million flowers a day
• a colony of bees produces between 10 kg and 100 kg of honey per year. This amount is strongly dependent on the location and its climate.

A bee colony consists of

• around 30,000 worker bees. In its short life of just a few weeks, the worker bee works in various functions: immediately after hatching as a cleaning bee, then as a nurse bee, then as a construction bee, then as a guardian and, last but not least, as a collector of nectar, honeydew, pollen and propolis.
• A queen. It is one and a half times the size of the working bees and has only one task to ensure the continued existence of the bee colony by laying as many eggs as possible. It is constantly fed with royal jelly by the bees and feeds exclusively on this nutrient-rich juice, which the bees produce themselves.
• A few hundred to a thousand drones, as the male bees are called, which only live in the bee colony during the summer months and whose only job is to mate the queen in drones. After completing the task, the drones are pushed out of the stick by the workers, where they starve to death because they cannot feed themselves.

During the collective flight, the individual bee visits only one species of plant at a time. One speaks of the ‘flower fidelity’ of the bee. This gift given by nature enables the bee to perform the important task of plant pollination as efficiently as possible. Fortunately, not every bee selects the same plants, so all flowering plants are pollinated by the bees. The plants attract the bees to suckle their nectar through the beautiful blooming and the fine smell.

They consume part of the groupage as food during the flight. They store the rest in their honey bladder and enrich it with the body’s own substances, the so-called enzymes, during the return flight to the beehive. In the beehive, the sugar juice is released to the bees, which also enrich the juice with their own enzymes. During this process, water is permanently extracted from the honey juice, so that it is “thickened” and made durable. The honey juice thickened in this way is then poured into empty honeycomb cells and aerated with intensive wing beating so that it dries down to a low water content and thus becomes storable.

Only now is the honey poured into the honeycomb cells and sealed with an airtight wax layer, so-called “capped”. The sealed honeycomb shows the beekeeper that the honey is ready for harvest. He now takes the honeycomb out of the beehive and removes the wax lid with a special fork. The honey is then thrown out of the honeycomb in a honey extractor by rapid rotation (centrifugal force) and collected. The honey obtained in this way is then carefully processed in Switzerland into wonderful nectaflor honey assemblages.

Bees not only provide us with the ever popular, fine honey, but also take on an extremely important function for the survival of all living things on earth: the valuable pollination of plants. They are therefore also an important farm animal. In search of food, they fly from flower to flower, pollinating a large part of agricultural crops, but also wild plants. Without this pollination work, many vegetables and fruits, but also forage plants for animals would be eliminated on our menu. For this reason, nectaflor is particularly committed to bee protection, beekeeping and raising public awareness of the issue of bees.

How do collecting bees make each other aware of interesting food sources and how do they describe the path to new food sources?

The bees have their own body language for this: the round and tail dance. By means of coded “dance” movements, the bees coming home pass on the necessary information about the location of new food sources to their fellow collectors. The smell also plays an important role here: their fine body hair carries the smell and the pollen from the food source into the beehive. It is an important indicator for the collecting bees how the new feed source tastes.

Honey serves as a feed and energy source for the bee colony. It enables the people to survive for long periods of time without outside food. In the case of many state-forming insects, the people die in winter and only the young queens survive in a cold stiffness; not so with bees. Thanks to their ability to maintain the required nest temperature in the beehive, the whole people survives. The honey supply created during the nectarless period (late summer, autumn and winter) serves them as a food supply and “fuel”. Does the bee colony have enough feed if the beekeeper is constantly harvesting honey from the beehive? Yes, the beekeeper tries to leave enough honey to the bee colony at the end of the growing season (i.e. in summer / autumn) so that they have enough food until the nectar flow starts in the coming spring.

If necessary, the beekeeper provides the people with a sufficient amount of substitute in the form of sugar solutions after the honey has been removed in autumn. The so-called sugar feeding at the end of the vegetation phase is only carried out in countries with a less favorable climate and a correspondingly short nectar flow. Feeding sugar is labor intensive and costly for beekeepers. In many regions where our nectaflor honey is harvested, beekeeping does not feed sugar and leaves the last honey harvest of the season to the bees.

The honeycombs built by the bees are hexagonal and there are exactly six bee products, is that a coincidence? Bee products are used in nutrition (as food or nutritional supplements), in cosmetics, in the pharmaceutical industry and in medicine, the so-called apitherapy. In the Swiss Food Ordinance, honey, pollen and royal jelly are permitted as food.

Honey
Aren’t we all associated with this precious food with positive properties or even with childhood memories such as warm honey milk on cold winter evenings? Honey is considered healthy! Honey is pure nature! It is an absolutely unchanged, pure natural product and reflects in its wonderful, almost endless variety the equally diverse botany around the globe. And so you could call the honey, so to speak, a fingerprint of its surroundings. The honeybees collect nectar, honeydew (secretions from plants and lice that live on plants) and pollen and use them together with the body’s own enzymes to produce the honey, which they store in the honeycomb as a supply. To get an overview of the variety of honey, the honey can be roughly divided into two groups: blossom honey and forest honey (honeydew honey).

Propolis
Propolis – the natural antibiotic! Propolis was already known to the Greeks and Romans, as can be seen in various traditional writings. Propolis comes from the Greek and means something like “Before the city”. Freely translated, one could also speak of “guardian” or “protector”. What is meant by this is that bee colonies with propolis – also called putty resin, bees resin or bee putty – line their honeycombs, seal small cracks and crevices and disinfect the interior of their building in order to protect themselves – the bee colony and its “place of residence” – from diseases that penetrate from outside and To protect epidemics. To make the propolis, the bees collect the resin from buds and mix them with wax and their own secretions.

Pollen
The pollen or pollen is a versatile food for the honeybee. It is the protein source of the bee and is formed in the stamens of the flowers. There are numerous different types of pollen, and the bees collect the individual types of pollen in a very specific manner and tailored to their needs.

beeswax
Beeswax – like bee venom and royal jelly – is made by the bees themselves. So it’s a pure bee product. The bees use this wax to manufacture their honeycombs, which are used to store honey and pollen and to raise their larvae. Freshly produced beeswax is white and only changes its color over time due to the absorption of propolis and dyes from the pollen. That is why the wonderful smell of beeswax is also characterized by these bee products, namely honey, propolis and pollen.

Royal Jelly
Royal jelly is also a royal juice! It is used to feed and raise the queen in a beehive. The bees make it from secretions from their food juice and maxillary glands. Its effect on the queen larva almost borders on a miracle. The king larva reaches 800 times its initial weight within 5 days and after another 11 days when the queen hatches, it has the ability to lay up to 2000 eggs a day. While an ordinary bee larva can only enjoy royal jelly for the first two to three days, the queen bee is fed royal jelly all her life, with the incredible result that she lives about 50 times as long as worker bees. It is therefore hardly surprising that the Royal Jelly has become a symbol of vitality, performance and vitality.

In Chinese medicine, royal jelly is even used as a regeneration and “rejuvenating agent”. The valuable feed juice owes this application to an extremely impressive biological phenomenon: the life expectancy of a queen bee living on this food is around five years, while the working bees producing the feed juice live only four months on average.

Bee Venom
The bee venom is only produced in the venom glands of worker bees and the queen bee and is a mixture of different secretions. The drones have neither a sting nor poison glands. The bee venom has a yellowish color and can be described as a syrupy, acidic liquid that has a bitter taste and is reminiscent of honey in smell. Bee venom is used by the bees as a defense weapon.