After following Dick Turnanski and his crew of beekeepers, I gained an understanding about how much hard work is put into taking care of the honeybees.
Dick Turnanski, the founder and former president of Glory Bee, bought the property behind his house to extend his garden and provide space for five honey supers. Mike France and Margarette Stanton join him in his backyard to extract honeycomb frames for the annual blackberry nectar honey harvest. Each box holds 9-10 frames, each loaded with honey, yielding around 30 pounds of fresh raw honey per box. In the upcoming weeks, Dick and his team at Glory Bee will extract the honey and process it for customer consumption.
Dick uses a bee smoker filled with burning burlap to subdue the bee colony inside the honey super. The smoke takes the edge off of the bees’ defensive behavior, driving them down to the box below. This allows him to safely extract the honey-filled frames, one by one.
Dick carefully pulls out a frame and brushes off excess honey bees that were left behind after the smoking process. He stores the frames in a dimly lit room before they are transported to the production facility, where they will be spun in a centrifuge to extract honey from the honeycomb.
This western honey bee (Apis mellifera) stumbles across its sticky honeycomb to produce honey one last time before bee keepers-remove the frames for harvesting. After the long-awaited honey extraction is over, the bees will return to their hives and begin the labor-intensive process of making honey again.
Dick explains to Stanton (on the left) and France (on the right) the importance of proper box handling and the many responsibilities of beekeeping. Saving the bees from harmful insecticides and mites is only the tip of the iceberg of challenges for any beekeeper. It is devastating when a colony collapses and months of hard work and honey production go to waste.
