"...if bees disappeared, man would have onlyfour years of life left!"
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
- According to the period of the year, with a peak in Spring and Summer and a strong drop during Winter, every beehive gives hospitality to one queen, about one hundred drones (in general only during the summer-spring period) and from 20,000 to 70,000 worker bees.
- During the productive season, every worker bee lives about 50 days, instead the queen lives up to 4-5 years. During this long period, in the productive season, she deposits up to 2000 eggs a day.
- To produce 1 Kg of honey, more than 50,000 flights there and back from the beehive to the flowers are necessary. That means that to pollinate flowers, a bee living 3 Km from the beehive must travel a total of 150,000 Km.
- Bees are insects that are very sensitive to pollution, but there are not cases of pollution in honey because bees die before that they can accumulate it.
- Honey is a food product that bees produce from flower nectar. This is collected and transformed thanks to specific substances belonging to bees. Then it is stored and left to ripen in the honeycombs of the beehive.
Mainly honey is constituted by monosaccharide sugar like fructose and glucose. The different prevalence of one or the other determines, with a drop in temperature, the crystallization or not of the honey. The kinds of honey which are rich in fructose have the tendency to stay in a liquid form for a long time. Instead those that are rich in glucose are inclined to crystallize in time. We advise softening a crystallized honey by soaking the pot in tepid water (not more than 40° centigrades to avoid the variation of the organoleptic characteristics).
