Honey Lexicon

The worker bee takes on various tasks in the beehive during her life and works as a cleaning bee, nurse bee, construction bee, guardian bee and finally as a collecting bee (collecting nectar, customers, fetching water).

Baking honey is a honey of reduced quality (often due to heat damage, atypical smell, etc.). Baking honey is still edible, but can only be used in industrial processing. No baking honey is marketed under the premium quality brand nectaflor®.

Defense weapon of the bees developed in the poison gland. Only worker bees and the queen have a sting with bee venom. The drones are spikeless. Since the stinger is barbed, it often sticks in the skin after the sting, and if stung, remove the sting as soon as possible to relieve the pain.

The beehive is the home of the bee colony – their home, so to speak.

A bee colony consists of a queen, around 30,000 workers and a few hundred to a thousand drones. It works as a complex, perfect organism and shows a pronounced social behavior. With the large number of individuals in a small space, each bee knows exactly when and which task it has to perform.

Honeycombs are a true masterpiece of nature and are built in the same way by all honey bees around the world. Thanks to their hexagonal, geometrically perfect, regular shape and their vertical walls, they are extremely stable and strong. The slightly inclined sides prevent the honey from escaping.

Beeswax is the term used in the wax glands of bees to produce and sweat out wax platelets that are used in the beehive as a building material for brood and honey storage.

This honey is obtained from the nectar of flowers.

Pollen, also called pollen, gets stuck on the bee’s fine coat when sucking nectar, where it also serves to pollinate the subsequent flowers. The bee collects the pollen as a food source by gradually collecting the individual pollen in the “pollen pants” on the hind legs.

Pollen is rich in protein and serves as food for bees and brood in the beehive. The pollen is also found in the honey and enables an exact determination of the variety or origin by the pollen analysis.

The botanical origin of the feed source determines the type of honey. We roughly differentiate between blossom honey (from nectar) and honeydew honey.

Honey is a food produced by bees for their own food supply and used by humans from the nectar of flowers or honeydew.

In principle, diabetics can consume honey in small quantities. However, we recommend diabetics to clarify the possible consumption of honey with their doctor.

Drones are male bees. They hatch from unfertilized eggs and grow taller than their sisters, the working bees. Drones have no sting and cannot eat on their own. Her only life’s work is to mate the queen. At the end of August, the workers expelled them from the floor.

The bee mixes nectar and honeydew with the body’s own enzymes. Enzymes are complex, heat-sensitive protein compounds that perform important functions in the metabolism of organisms. They act as a bio-catalyst that can accelerate chemical reactions, convert and split substances. Enzymes e.g. Multiple sugar broken down into single sugar. Natural honey has a high enzyme activity.

See sugar

Valuable, nutrient-rich feed juice for the rearing of the larvae during the first 2-3 days of life and for the lifelong feeding of the queen bee.

There are a large number of bees in the world, but only the apis mellifera (Latin name) with its subspecies is the domesticated type of bee, which collects the tasty honey for us humans. In addition, there is an almost endless number of wild bee species, which also play an important ecological role across the globe, since they also pollinate plants.

Honeydew honey is created when bees primarily soak up honeydew on deciduous and coniferous trees. What is honeydew? Honeydew is a sugar-containing secretion from insect-sucking plants (lice). These insects feed on the juice from the sieve tubes of various plants and excrete unnecessary substances as so-called honeydew.

The beekeeper takes care of the keeping, multiplication and breeding of bees and is concerned to allow the bees to produce honey as optimally as possible by not only taking care of the bee colony but also ensuring a good range of traditional costumes in the vicinity of the beehives.

Inhibine is the general name for substances that inhibit the growth of germs. The chemical structure of inhibins is very different and complex. The inhibins also include the plant dyes (flavonoids) contained in honey.

The queen is the mother of the whole bee colony. She is responsible for the offspring and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day at the time when the bees can collect nectar or honeydew (with us from around February to August). This is an enormous achievement, which she can only achieve thanks to the fact that she is constantly fed with royal jelly by the workers. The queen is the only female sexually fully developed animal in the beehive. It can live up to 5 years.

Over time, every honey crystallizes out. This is a natural, physical process that has no negative impact on the quality of the honey. How and how quickly a honey crystallizes depends, among other things, on the glucose content or the ratio of fruit (fructose) to glucose (glucose); this in turn is determined by the botanical origin of the honey. The greater the proportion of glucose, the faster the honey crystallizes out.

Crystallized honey can be liquefied again in a warm water bath (below 40 ° C).

See sugar

Nectar is a high-sugar liquid that plants excrete as glandular secretions from the nectaries to attract animals. Nectar serves as food for many animals and, along with honeydew, is the raw material from which bees produce honey. If honey is predominantly obtained from nectar, it can be called blossom honey.

Propolis is a resin-like mass made by bees that is used in the beehive as a building material (sealing openings, crevices, etc.) and for the care and health of the beehive / people (inhibition of bacteria, fungi, etc.). Propolis is a type of natural antibiotic that is composed of many different, widely varying substances.

Proteins or proteins are biological macromolecules that are made up of amino acids. Only a small amount of protein is contained in honey.

In the course of their lives, worker bees become so-called collecting bees. Now it’s her job to collect flower nectar, honeydew and pollen. The bees are always on the lookout for new, rich sources of feed. The task of the “search bees” is to discover such. If a new source of food is discovered during the constant reconnaissance flights, the search bees immediately fly back into the beehive and use the bee dance to tell their sisters where the source of food can be found.

Honey is a natural product and – like all raw foods – should not be given to children under the age of 12 months because their gastrointestinal system is not yet fully developed. Spores of the bacterium Clostridium botulinum, which are harmless to adults and which may be present in honey, can in rare cases trigger diseases such as infant botulism.

Centrifuging is the gentle method of honey extraction that is common today. The beekeepers carefully uncover the ripe honeycombs removed from the beehive. The honey is then thrown out of the honeycomb in a honey extractor by means of rapid rotation (by centrifugal force, but without the action of heat). The honeycombs remain intact and can be reused by the bees.

The legal quality requirements for the marketing of honey in Switzerland are regulated in the Swiss Food Ordinance. It provides precise guidelines on the nature, extraction, treatment and declaration.

Nectar honey or honeydew from predominantly one particular traditional plant. Proof of the variety purity is provided on the basis of a pollen analysis. Examples of varietal honey are our nectaflor orange blossom honey, nectaflor rosemary honey, nectaflor white fir honey or nectaflor acacia honey.

The variety of honey seems to be almost unlimited, because it is based on such numerous factors as the type of flower, the variety of flowers, the type of plant, the season, the weather – and this all around our diverse world. We differentiate between mixed and mixed honeys, so-called honey assemblages / blends. Assemblage or blend, these terms have long been familiar to us from the world of coffee or chocolate. In fact, honey is very similar. Here, too, wonderful mixtures of different types of honey can be produced, of course according to carefully developed recipes that state which types of honey are mixed together.

The color can vary from almost transparent to golden brown and dark brown to almost black. The taste can range from sweet and mild to powerfully spicy and malty. The basic principle is that light honeys taste rather mild and sweet, darker honeys taste more powerful and aromatic.

The stand is the place where the beekeeper sets up his beehives. A stand should offer a large and long-lasting food supply for the bees. It should also be protected from negative weather influences where possible and, if necessary, offer protection against unauthorized access to the bees and the honey room. The beehives are often at the same location all year round, but it also happens that the beekeeper changes the locations regularly and thus ensures an optimal food supply for the bees (see hiking beekeepers)

In the course of their life, the worker bees are also assigned to the guard service. Your task is now to protect the beehive from foreign animals. Therefore, everyone who wants to go to the stick is thoroughly smelled at the flight hole and checked whether it has the typical stick scent. If not, the intruders are rigorously driven out. The guards use their sting and bee venom for this. This is fatal to other insects.

A beekeeper changes the location of his bee colonies regularly and looks for the best possible locations with a wide range of bee food. The beekeeper often changes locations depending on the vegetation (migrating from the central plateau to the Alps in the Alps) and can thus have a positive effect on honey production by the bees.

In addition to various types of sugar, pollen, proteins, inhibins, enzymes and minerals, honey also consists of water. The water content in honey is precisely regulated. According to the Swiss Food Ordinance, a water content between 16-21 percent is allowed. Ideally, it is 16-19 percent. Excessive water content is a sign of unripe honey that can ferment.

Honey consists of approximately 80 percent different natural types of sugar. The main types of sugar are fructose (fructose) and glucose (glucose). Others are malt sugar (maltose) and cane sugar (sucrose), and also melezitose for honeydew honeys. Depending on the type of honey, the proportions of the individual types of sugar fluctuate considerably. The ratio of the types of sugar influences the tendency of a honey to crystallize.