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Tupelo Honey Season, Excitement in the Air 2
Tupelo Honey Production
There is a tangible excitement in the air as the honeybees are loaded on sleeping bear farms trucks for their annual trip to the Tupelo river bottoms of the Florida panhandle.
The beekeeper arrives at dawn to load the honeybees on the truck before the day’s first flight. We wait until the Tupelo starts to bloom before the exodus begins so the bees are in the midst of millions of blooms on the river bottoms and direct all their energy into harvesting this one special nectar.
Bees will gather nectar from the nearest source with the highest sugar concentration and timing is crucial to get the purest Tupelo possible with the best flavor unique to Tupelo honey.
Other honey plants and trees bloom right before and after Tupelo trees. High bush Gallberry blooms right before Tupelo but has a different flavor and crystallizes very fast. After the Tupelo trees stop secreting nectar the Low Bush Gallberry will yield a nice light honey, but it also has a different flavor.
There is more than one species of Tupelo. The most delectable is Nyssa Ogeche, commonly called white Tupelo or Ogeechee Tupelo. That is the prize we are after to put in our jars.
Read MoreMaking Queen Bees in Florida 0
- Sharon Jones and Niki Popp making queen bees in Florida
Every year Sleeping Bear Farms send hives to Florida to take advantage of the early warm weather and the flowering plants that produce bee pollen. At the winter solstice the days get longer and the queen will start laying eggs. When the flowers and trees in Florida begin to flower, the pollen increases the queens egg laying and the hives begin to build up large populations of bees.
In February Sharon and the queen yard staff begin to search for hives that exhibit traits desirable for breeding new queens. We hand pick the best hives and use their queens as breeding stock. Very small newly hatched larvae about 18 hours old are selected and carefully placed in special cups with royal jelly.
Special hives are prepared to accept the “grafted`’ larvae and tricked into thinking they are queenless and the worker bees fill the special cups with copious amounts of royal jelly. It is the generous amounts of royal jelly that make the young female larvae magically develop into much larger queens with fully developed ovaries.
The queen yard staff provide our crew with up to 300 queen cells per day that we place into new hives made from existing stock. We wait about 18 days and then return to the beeyard to see if the queens have successfully mated.
The virgins generally begin mating flights on warm mornings when the wind is laying low and may make over a dozen matings with drones. The more matings the better, as the queen will have a large reserve of sperm.
Bees Collecting Pollen for Royal Jelly Production 0
Honeybees will forage for the most nutritious pollen with the highest protein content and store it in the combs. It is fed and eaten by the bees as a requirement to produce royal jelly in the head glands of young workers.
Royal jelly is eaten by all bees in varying degrees and is essentially the “currency” of the hive. Without adequate protein, young workers will not be able to make enough royal jelly to fed the young larvae to develop into “fat” bees. Bees without enough body fat cannot make abundant royal jelly. The saying goes, “skinny bees make skinny bees”
Bee bread is actually pollen stored with some honey added that is fermented by LAB (lactic acid bacteria) that partially breaks down the pollen cell walls rendering the pollen more digestible. Think yogurt and other fermented foods. It keeps well too.
