Friday, 25 May 2012

Description of why is honey so expensive

Why is honey so expensive in South Africa? Well I am going to give you three reasons why honey is so expensive.

First like any type of farming you depend on nature, for example the amount of rain during the winter will have an effect on the flowers of the bushes and trees. If there are no flowers, there would be no nectar for the bees to harvest. In the Western Cape we did not get much rain during the winter in 2011, so according to last year's records we harvested less honey than the previous year. This is not just the case in 2011 that was a bad season, if I were to draw a graph of the past 5 years you will see a decrease in our total amount of honey harvest for each season. So honey has become rare but that is not the only reason why honey is so expensive.

The second reason is because of the whole process that honey is going through. So first you must harvest the honey at the beehive, where you collect the frames where the bees store the honey. The frames consist of many wax cells, where the bees store the honey and if the cell is full the bees seal it off. So the next step is to uncap those cells, with a uncapping fork. Then you extract the honey and after extracting the honey you need to filter it and then you can pour it into pots.

Then the third and last reason is about a special and unique little animal, the bee. Did you know that the worker bee (female) produce approximately 2.5 grams of honey in her life, they only live for about 40 days during the season period, and some of them die earlier because they work themselves to death. Just think how many bees you will need to fill up a 1 kilogram pot of honey? Then it will take a bee swarm up to 2 - 3 weeks to produce enough honey for the beekeeper to harvest.

Honey
So these are the three biggest reasons why honey is so expensive in South Africa, because it is unique, rare and a long process to complete, but this I can insure you that it is worth the wait, because the victory will always be sweet.

Saturday, 12 May 2012

Personal

The reason for creating this blog, is because it is an assignment for English Communication. First I never blogged before in my life, so this my first time. The saying goes, "there is always a first time for everything".

So blogging is totally new for me and a new challenge, to test my skills and ability to do things what is new.

Well before I could have made this post I needed to create my blog. I did not find it difficult because I am studying for a teacher and one of my subjects is Computer Applications Technology (CAT), so I had the necessary skills to work on the computer. So I played around with all the functions on blogger by clicking on every possible link and added my profile picture and background. The only thing I founded difficult was to upload a new theme from the Internet to my blog. But there is another saying that say, "there are many ways to skin a cat", so I designed my own template.

My blog is about beekeeping, we have a beekeeping business so I am going to tell our story and how great is the bee. I am looking forward to this journey of blogging and I hope you are going to enjoy my blog as much as I am going to.