What you would think when you hear about honey? how many kinds of honey do you know?
Well, it is difficult to find original wild honey in my place recently, and we cannot just buy what is offered to us, because it will cost us both money and our health. You can imagine that if you think that you have bought pure honey and then take it as a healthy natural medicine, but the fact is that you just bought sugarcane mix it with some other stuff. What would happen to you if you had diabetes or other complicated illness? Saying this thing, I don’t claim myself as a honey expert; I don’t even know how to distinguish the original pure honey and the fake one. Even so, people will automatically ignore the honey seller at first glance because the mindset has already indoctrinated.
But now, I can feel at ease when I need honey, because I have had my brother and brother in law who cultivated the sting-less bees at his home, and it is even better than the stinging bees because the sting-less bee honey possesses higher propolis. Besides, I can get bee pollen which is nominated as a super-food by WHO.
Ok, cut the cheese.
As I have promised that I will post something about the sting-less bees a while ago. and now here it is
Sunday afternoon, my brother in law and I were decided to harvest stingless bees that he has cultivated for a little while at home, there were two log-woods of sting-less bee nest, they are already with honey box on top. We have checked honey in the honey box night before and it was ready to harvest. So here we go.
Equipment we need
Basic equipment we need are a small portable water dispenser pump and a bottle, 100 cm of a small hose. And the rest is to protect me from the bees attack. Although it does not sting, it will summon over our hairs and face, so the transparent mask or thin clothes are needed. After recharging the portable water dispenser pump, I started to assemble those equipment parts to use it for harvesting honey.
Here are some pictures for you to visualize it better
Step-by-step harvesting method:
- Open the honey box on top of the nest log, and then open the plastic to see the honey bag (black marble cell) the size of the honey bag is approximately as big as a thumb, and sometimes it can be as big as a toe depends on kind of species of stingless be. What I have here is Heterogona itama, most of the honey bag size as big as a thumb.
- Prepare the modified water dispenser pump and start to siphon after opening the honey bag
- Collect the honey into the bottle with the pump.
Cultivating the stingless bees is quite easy, what we need to do is planting flowers as much as we can, and mostly the flower which stingless bees love much are sunflower, roses, jasmine, orchid, and many kinds of orchards. Because the stingless bees fly around about 1 km for food searching, it is not necessary to have all kinds of flowers on your own. Flowers in the wild are also the food source for them. What we need to do is placing the stingless bees log wood under the shade and protect it from the raindrop and keep away from children.
Today, we succeeded to collect 300 ml honey from 2 logs, it good enough during this season. Most of the stingless bee farmers are only able to collect 300 ml from 10 logs. Currently the price of stingless bees honey is extremely high, it cost about Rp. 750,000/L and about Rp. 200,000 for a bottle of 250 ml. Today, we saved Rp. 200,000 for our health.
Much Love
El-Nailul