Honey
Production Business Tips
Happy honey producing and marketing!
Honey
production is an integral part of beekeeping. As a matter of fact, beekeeping
is like running a business entity with a simple and solid management system. It
consists of a factory of honey production with thousand of workers, your honey
worker bees and yourself on top of the organization and concurrently holding
the positions of factory, honey production section, marketing and sales manager,
and maybe the finance and administration manager too.
As
a business, your objective might be to produce and sell quality honey. Honey
has been consumed by human since long ago and is very valuable with a lot of
benefits. The use of honey has a very long history not only as a nutritious food
but also as other meanings that reflects its significance in cultures and
religions.
Honey
production quality depends on many factors which are basically related to the
source of nectar or floral source. Other factors that determine the quality of honey
is processing and packaging. The floral source determines the taste and aroma
of honey as well as its water content and clarity. Based on its floral source the
honey production inputs can be derived from specific flower nectars or from unspecified
origins, or blended after honey collection.
Most
of the available honey sold in the market is blended honey or a mixture of several floral sources with different
flavor, color, density and various area of origin. You can also find polyfloral honey or wildflower honey
which is derived from the nectar of
several flower types. Therefore you may find some inconsistency of this type of
honey from season to season in its taste, aroma and flavor, depending on which
flower is more dominant.
If
you wish to produce monofloral honey,
which is collecting honey that is derived from the nectar of a single type of flower, you need to manage that your
honey bees has access to only one type of flower, which is quite a difficult
task to do. As a matter of fact, you can not control all your bees, some will
collect nectar from other flowers, and there is a great possibility that your
monofloral honey may contain a small amount of nectar from other flower types.
Let
us observe how the bees are involved in this honey production process from the
collected nectar from flowers that surrounds their hive. A soon as the bees
arrives in their hive, they will empty their fully stomach by regurgitating the
nectar then swallow and ingest it again for several times until it gets
partially digested. This is actually the transformation process from nectar to
honey. The bees will do this regurgitating and ingesting together for several
times until its reaches the wanted quantity which they put into the honey comb.
This
newly stored nectar still contains a lot of water and some natural yeast that
may cause the fermentation of the sugar content in the nectar. By nature the
bees will fan their wings to produce an air stream above the honeycombs to
facilitate the evaporation of water from the nectar. This produces a higher
sugar concentration which will eventually prevent fermentation to occur. This
is a natural process of honey production in a bee’s life, which then will be
stored as food source during hard times like winter.
The
task of a beekeeper is maximizing honey production by encouraging the bees to
produce more honey than what will be needed by the bees. Such over production
of honey will be beneficial for both the bees and the beekeeper.
At
the end of a honey production process, you will get ripe honey which is a
thick, sticky sweet liquid. It contains a lot of fructose and glucose with a
smaller amount of maltose and sucrose. Although the common presentation of
honey is the bottled liquid form, but there are other forms of honey which are
subjected to various honey processing methods. The application of methods is
fully the discretion of the beekeeper.
To
mention some varieties that can be further developed: raw honey, strained
honey, ultra-filtered honey, pasteurized honey, crystallized honey,
ultra-sonicated honey, whipped honey, dried honey, chunk honey and comb honey. Each
variety has its own benefit and purposes, which can be addressed to a certain
market.
Well,
with such many varieties of honey production, a beekeeper has a lot of
challenges to fulfill some market needs and this of course, should be the job
of you as a marketing and sales manager. Isn’t it?
