Honey is the product obtained from the transformation, carried out by bees, of the secretions of flowers (nectar) and of the secretions of some insects (honeydew).
Stored by the bees in the cells of the honeycombs, the honey is extracted by centrifugation, left to settle in special containers and then packaged.
According to Italian law, honey cannot be added whatsoever and the only treatments it can undergo are: extraction from the honeycombs by centrifugal force; decanting; guided filtering and crystallization.
There are many ways to practice breeding, these change according to your interests.
The quality of edible honey depends not only on the work of bees and environmental conditions (climate, flora, etc.), but also on a second factor: human intervention. To facilitate its production, extract it and make it available to the consumer, he must in fact perform various procedures.
Since the production of honey from bees that feed naturally is not always the same and, on the contrary, is highly irregular from one year to the next, some beekeepers feed the bees with sugared water, installing special dispensers that function as a sort of manger.
On the one hand, this improves the overall yield of the hive – which is the artificial house built by man to replace the natural hive – on the other hand it penalizes its aroma and flavor.
Not only that, humans can also interfere with the organoleptic and taste characteristics of food in many other ways such as:
- manipulation of the flora surrounding the hives;
- the choice of the harvesting period and the method (pouring, centrifugation, etc.);
- any pasteurization of the food, processing and storage conditions, etc.
Today, bees are considered endangered animals.
They suffer terribly from environmental anthropization and, most of all, the use of insecticides in agriculture.
However, being the primary pollinators, bees allow the fertilization of plants, and without them agriculture would be so compromised as to become insufficient to support the population.
It is essential that the apiary management method is mainly based on respect for bees and the environment, creating and making the farm biocompatible, that is, following simple rules or techniques to be followed on a daily basis.
Here are some of them:
Interference in the life of bees must be kept to a minimum.
Nothing must be inserted into the hive that is known to be certainly or probably harmful to bees, us or the environment as a whole and nothing must be taken that bees cannot afford to lose.
Bees know what they are doing, our job is to listen to them and provide the best conditions for their well-being, both inside and outside the hive.
These concepts form a solid basis for our company’s thinking regarding the approach to bees and beekeeping.
“Natural”, “balanced” or “sustainable” whatever name we want to give to beekeeping, this remains in fact a procedure and therefore there is no single reading. It is necessary to remain flexible and always open to methods that can improve our techniques.
We must be attentive to indications on what seems to work, always with the possibility that there are better ways yet to be discovered or rediscovered.
