Pure Peninsula Honey (Moorooduc)

The farm shop provides a range of activities including free tastings of 100% pure Australian honey, see live bees at work, browse our bee themed gift shop, sample cosmetics made from manuka honey, read amazing bee facts, walk through a mock apiary, smell the natural fragrance of pure bees wax candles and enquire about farm talks.

Information provided on the premises:

Worker bees are female bees. There are about 40,000 workers in a hive. They do almost all the chores in the hive. They gather pollen or nectar, guard the entrance to prevent foreign insects from entering, clean the hive, build the comb, make honey, tend to the queen and feed the larvae and drones. They even fan the hive to keep it cool on a hot summer's day. A worker bee makes about 1 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. They live for about six weeks.

The brood box (or nursery) is the bottom box of the hive. The queen bee usually lives and lays her eggs in the brood box. Beekeepers seldom take honey from the brood box because the colony uses this honey for everyday food. Bee's enter and leave the hive through the entrance (a narrow horizontal slot) which is located in the bottom board underneath the box. The hive temperature is maintained around 34 degrees C.

Honey supers are the boxes stacked on top of the brood box. They contain eight frames on which bees build honeycomb. Each frame can be removed when the comb is full of honey. Bees mainly store honey in the supers. Beekeepers may put more then one super on top when bees are producing honey at a fast rate. The number of supers depends on the size of the colony and how much nectar is available for bees to collect. The supers are covered with a lid.

The Queen Bee - Each colony has one queen. The queen is the largest bee and her job is to lay eggs. The queen bee has one mating period in her life, this is when she leaves the hive and mates in flight with many drones. With her eggs now fertilized, she returns to the hive and begins to lay eggs. During this time she is cleaned and fed by the worker bees so she can spend all her time laying eggs, 1000 or more per day. The queen lives for about two to four years.

Drones are stingless male bees. They are the future fathers of the bee colony. They have larger eyes and antennae than the females. These help them succeed in their only task - locating and mating with the queen during flight. The swiftest drones will catch and mate with the Queen, but their life is short. After mating, they will float back to earth and be dead by the time they reach the ground. Usually there are only a few hundred drones in a hive and they may be evicted at the beginning of winter or when a shortage of food occurs.

Royal Jelly is a special substance that is the primary source of nutrition for larva and what causes some to grow into Queen Bees. It is a milky substance made of digested pollen and honey mixed with a chemical secreted from a gland in the bee's head. It is often used as a fertility stimulant and dietary supplement and contains high levels of many forms of vitamin B. Hives only produce a small amount of Royal Jelly and that is why it is sold at a premium price.

Raising a Queen Normally the colony only Contains one queen. Without her the colony would cease to exist because the workers die of old age and no new generation of bees is developed.

The bee's sense when the existing queen is going to leave the nest (swarm). The bees build a number of queen cells that are larger than a normal cell and the existing queen lays eggs into these. The larva in these cells is only fed Royal Jelly and as a result a queen develops instead of a worker. Scientists have tried to discover what food materials are in Royal Jelly but no one as yet has managed it.

About four days after hatching, a queen larva will be large enough to fill most of the cell. Workers than cap the cell and the larva spins a cocoon around itself and changes into a pupa. Only 16 days after the egg was laid, a new adult queen emerges. The new queen immediately searches for other queen cells. When she finds them, she chews a small hole in the wall of each one, and stings and kills them. If two queens come out of their cells at the same time, they fight until one is killed.

How do Bees Make Honey - Honeybees use nectar to make honey. Nectar is almost 80% water with some complex sugars. Nectar is the clear liquid that drops from the end of the blossom. Bees get nectar from flowers like clovers, dandelions, eucalypts and fruit tree blossoms. They use their long, tubelike tongues like straws to suck the nectar out of the flowers and they store it in their 'honey stomachs'. Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach. The honey stomach holds almost 70 mg of nectar and when full, it weighs almost as much as the bee does. Honeybees must visit between 100 and 1500 flowers in order to fill their honey stomachs.

The honeybees return to the hive and pass the nectar onto other worker bees. These bees suck the nectar from the honeybee's stomach through their mouths. These 'house bees' 'chew' the nectar for about half an hour. During this time, enzymes are breaking the complex sugars in the nectar into simple sugars so that it is both more digestible for the bees and less likely to be attacked by bacteria while it is stored within the hive. The bees then spread the nectar throughout the honeycombs where water evaporates from it, making it a thicker syrup. The bees make the nectar dry even faster by fanning it with their wings. Once the honey is gooey enough, the bees seal off the cell of the honeycomb with a plug of wax. The honey is stored until it is eaten. In one year, a colony of bees eats between 55 and 90 kilograms of honey.

Opening Hours:

Opening Hours

Cost:

Free Entry

Review:

Worth stopping by, especially if some-one in the family loves honey. Outside the main building is a display of hives where you can read about the different types of bees and how hives are constructed. This area also has some shaded and unshaded tables.

The building has an active bee hive where you can see bees in action plus a tasting area with lots of different types of honey. There are lot of information displays about bees.

The range of honey products is amazing and the bee themed gift shop is very extensive.

Photos:

Location

871 Derril Road, Moorooduc 3933 Map

✆ (03) 5978 8413

Email Enquiry

Web Links

→ www.purepeninsulahoney.com.au

→ Pure Peninsula Honey on Facebook