How We "Make" Honey
Hilljack Sugar Shack
Honey is a very sweet, thick, sugary solution that can be included into many recipes. Here at the Hilljack Sugar Shack we don't make our own honey, that's because pure honey is not man-made, there is no recipe for it, instead we have our own personal manufacturers to make it for us. They are our honey bees of course, located down the street from the Hilljack Sugar Shack.
Quick Info on Honey
Honey is known to be one of the easiest foods to digest.
Honey is used in many cough syrups and losenges thanks to it's thick, smooth texture which soothes a sore throat.
Many people use honey as a moistening agent in baking because of its ability to readily absorb air.
All honey is not the same color and flavor, opposed to popular belief. Honey actually varies upon the type of flower that produced the nectar for the honey, and how old the actual honey is.
How Honey Is Made
Step 1.- Honey bees fly around the fields from flower to flower collecting nectar from each flower, and pollinating the next one it reaches.
Step 2.- As the bees collect the nectar from each flower, they store it in sacs within their bodies.
Step 3.- When the bees' sacs are all full, it returns to the hive and then regurgitates the nectar into the mouths of "house bees".
Step 4.- The house bees add enzymes from their bodies into the nectar, which causes most of the water in the nectar to evaporate, leaving only about 18% water in the soon to be honey.
Step 5.- When the house bee is done with converting the nectar it is stored in a cell of the honeycomb. Over time the nectar ripens and turns to the honey that we collect and eat.
What We Do With The Honey
Since the bees really do all the work in making the honey, all we have to do is collect the honey combs, extract the honey, and bottle it. Here are the steps to do this, a little more in depth.
Step 1.- The first thing we do to collect the honey is get our beekeeper gear on. It is very important to be protected if the bees decide to sting you, and more than likely, you will get stung. The person collecting will bring what is called a "bee-smoker" which lets out a puff of smoke at the bees, blocking their pheromones, which tell them what to do. With the pheromones blocked, most bees will not attack. Using the bee-smoker enables the collector to pull out the frames that have the honey we will be collecting. There are many layers of frames. The top frames are where we take honey from, it is where the bees store the honey they don't need. If we took honey from all of the frames the bees would be left with nothing to feed on.
Step 2.- The next step is to remove the honeycombs from the frames, which is done by the person collecting the honey with a special all purpose tool that makes life a lot easier. This tool is simply called a "hive-tool".
Step 3.- The honey combs are then taken back to the Hilljack Sugar Shack, where we have our honey extractor machine which as you might have guessed, extracts the honey from the combs. Before the combs can go into the machine though we need to uncap them. The honeycombs are all covered with beeswax that protects the honey, which we uncap with an uncapping knife that essentially heats up and melts the tops or caps of the honeycombs off, revealing the sweet honey.
Step 4.- The honeycombs are now ready to enter the extractor. What happens here is the machine spins the honeycombs against its side walls , while the machine is spinning the honey runs down into a collection tank at the bottom of the extractor.
Step 5.- All we have to do now is store the honey. Since we produce such a large amount of honey here at the Hilljack Sugar Shack, we pour the newly extracted honey into 5 gallon containers to store the product. This way we can bottle our honey as needed, it is more efficient to store the honey this way rather than bottled. When we need to bottle honey we unseal a container and bottle the whole 5 gallons. Now the product is finished and can be sent to customers, or put in our store in the sugar house.
A young Jesse sporting the beekeeper's protection and a frame from the hive.
A typical honey extractor
Our final product
The finished honey draining into a storage container.
