Professional Beekeeping Competence From Production To Filling?

Full  automatically extraction street combined with uncapping machine, working with heated knifes. There is almost no possibillity to check each comb before uncapping and extraction. uncapping-wax-melting-tub. Rotating frame hives

Newly the apiary  „Sonnentracht", an affiliated company of „Honigimporteur Walter Lang GmbH", has been founded. With truck and a fork lift truck firm owner Gerrit Lang drives together with his 600 beecolonies across Germany. Extraction will be done at home in a full  automatically extraction street combined with uncapping machine, working with heated knifes. There is almost no possibillity to check each comb before uncapping and extraction. But it is important, as there might be some small brood areas on the comb which can be easily overseen and thus honey is extracted together with brood - and honeyquality is derogated.

A „Sonnentracht-honey-expert" is being bred and labeled within a few minutes anyhow: Some customers and vistors who happened to be there at the time of an open house day could „apply their impressions in a blind-tasting and prove their taste perception. Only very few people did find out all kinds and are allowed now to call themselves a 'Sonnentracht-honey-expert'" (Dbj 11/05, S. XV).

Other technical advisers and experts tell us how to produce beewax without residuals - for magazin beekeepers a not so easy task, as it turned out in an article issued recently in „Deutsches Bienenjournal (Dbj)".

Is it any wonder that an expert sometimes passes as a wise one? However, the technical adviser J.-D. Bunsen from Bioland in parts really knows a lot about beewax: „For storing honey you won’t find a cleaner medium than natural combs. That beewax never had been influenced by any processing procedure and saves a natural taste". Nevertheless he uses wired frames with foundation wax at least in the brood area of the hive. However, when he now recommends a socalled „uncapping-wax-melting-tub" for gaining uncapping wax effectively, not only beginners may think: maybe he is a „Sonnentracht-honey-expert? He wrote in his article: „They are a useful and inexpensive alternative to centrifugal machines. These uncapping-wax-melting-tubs are able to gain back the cristalized honey". But parts of the harvested honey are damaged to such a degree, that it can only be sold as lower quality honey. (Dbj 11/05, p. 478-479)

More abstruse is however a beekeeper, who is working with twirling frame hives. As if honeybees haven’t to bear enough manipulations! That beekeeper uses the twirling frame hive for swarmprevention. „In a 7-day-cycle the brood combs are being rotated for 180°, then the queen cell stood head first and was destroyed by the bees. ... After finding the first long maggots in the twirling frame hive, I started to rotate the frames once a day for 180°. In order to make this rotation slow as much as possible, I took a small electric motor with battery" (Dbj 11/05, p. 507).

This twirling or rotating frame hive was invented by the ungarian beekeeper Mr. Konya, who introduced it at Apimondia 2003 in Ljubljana. It is said he has 400 colonies in 10 vehiculars. In each vehicular you’ll find an electric motor working with rechargeable battery and a complicated machinery which is able to rotate the twirling frames once a day for 180° over the complete brood saison  (Dbj 11/04, p. 474).