In late April and early May the bees have another pollination job in the Idaho and Oregon tree fruit orchards. Cherries (above), pears and apples all bloom this time of year and all require honey bee pollination. Weather conditions can be problematic for both the fruit grower and the bees. Rain for a week at a time in these orchards is not uncommon this time of year and can both starve the bees and ruin the fruit crop.

As the bees finish their pollination duty they go on to more hospitable areas where lots of spring wild flowers bloom and we start working with the bees for this year's honey crop.

HONEY PRODUCTION:
No honey has been taken from the hives so far this year. With all the moving around in addition to hit and miss weather conditions the bees survival has depended to a large part on the honey they have gathered at the various stops throughout the spring. But now with their populations and weight (food stores) increasing it's time to get them ready for honey production.
The first step in this process is to reverse the boxes. Since last fall the deep box has been on the top and the shallow on the bottom. The smaller box is primarily food storage as the bees prefer the larger deeper box for brood rearing. By reversing the boxes (shallow on top), the bees will fill it with honey and it will become their food source for the winter. These two boxes are the bee hive and no honey is ever taken from them.
Over the course of the year, the hive will produce several times more honey than the bees consume. It is the surplus honey that is harvested. This is done by adding additional boxes known as supers after the bees have filled the deep and shallow boxes which they live in year round.
The photo shows the summer configuration of the hive as well as a super already added to one of the four hives on the pallet. Supers will be added throughout the summer to provide space for the bees to store the surplus honey they will gather. These supers will be removed and extracted, leaving the two hive boxes untouched. More on extracting in July.

POLLEN, HONEY & SUGARS:
Pollen is gathered from flowers by foraging bees and transported to the hive in tiny pollen baskets on the bees hind legs shown in the photo above. Pollen provides essential proteins and other nutrients necessary for a complete diet for the bees. Pollen is an essential food for brood rearing and is fed to the developing larva, consumed by the adult bees and stored in the hive.

Nectar from flowers, on the other hand, is a liquid and is transported to the hive in the bees honey stomach which isn't really a stomach at all - simply a vessel. Honey bees have two stomachs - a large honey stomach which has no digestive function and a smaller digestive stomach which functions as the name implies. The separate digestive stomach is connected after the honey stomach which permits this large reservoir to double as a food reserve for the bee when necessary. But while foraging for nectar, the large honey stomach essentially makes each bee a little flying tanker.

Both pollen and sugar from the nectar are required to form a complete diet for the honey bee much like protein and carbohydrate is required for a complete diet in humans.

Most of the sugar in honey is a simple single molecule sugar consisting of fructose and glucose as separate simple sugars. Glucose is found in the human body as blood sugar. White or brown processed table sugar is sucrose a complex two molecule sugar that requires a breaking down process of inversion or molecular separation to become a simple sugar.

Because honey is already in this simple sugar molecular form, it is therefore almost twice as sweet as the same amount of table sugar.