The Latest Greatest Beekeeping Supplies

These newer containers, that sit on their heads so to speak, are the best there is for honey. Consumers don't need to to wait for the honey to run to the top because it's always already there. Makers of jams and jellies, ketchup and mayo have already found this out and honey is just catching up. No mess, no fuss, and no old-style glass jars to drip and run and get sticky. Look for honey in these types of containers.

These are beekeeping tools called smokers. There is a smoldering fire inside that produces a cool, white smoke used by beekeepers, which leads to this. The Seinfeld Bee Movie made two really, really bad errors. The bees in a hive that do all the work are female workers (the movie said they were guys). And when beekeepers use smoke when working a hive it doesn't do any harm to the bees at all. AT ALL! Smoke momentarily masks the many pheromone messages running throughout a colony sending information from the queen to the workers, and from worker to worker. When smoke enters a colony there is a short bit of confusion in the hive, the beekeeper comes in and does his work to help the colony then goes away leaving the colony just fine. So there, Jerry.

For commercial beekeepers, extractors (those machines that remove honey from the frames - they work much like a lettuce spinner, be we keep the water and return the lettuce) come in sizes large, and very large. The round, tub-like machine holds 50 frames but stands alone because the beekeeper has to load the frames individually, and then unload them.

The larger, industrial machine holds 84 frames which are loaded onto a conveyer, moved into and out of the extractor automatically and then loaded back into the boxes to be put back on the hives. This is the most sophisticated extractor machine in the world and is manufactured by Cowen Enterprises in Utah. Beekeepers at the meeting get to see how this runs and what it would take to set one up.