Here's the "Buzz" on what happened yesterday

Yesterday was the best day yet! We went to Nausori to talk with our partner Saraswati. I don't remember if I explained Saraswati, but it is a college and a small business for helping farmers create their own jobs through beekeeping and Coconut Oil making. We had the opportunity to make our own honey! First we learned about the process through a series of videos and a booklet so that we could better understand what the members of Saraswati do for a living. After the bees have made the honey and covered it in wax to keep it from dripping everywhere, I got to scrape off the wax to reveal the honey underneath. The video is too large to load on here so here is a link to view: Click Here to view video. The bees are so cute when they are first born. We got to see one climb out of it's little honey comb. As soon as they are hatched, they go right back in and clean out the pocket so that the other bees can fill it with honey. The baby bees don't have developed stingers so we got to hold them. They were so fuzzy!

This is what the hives look like when they still have wax on them (they call this stage "capped frames")

After this process is complete, You have to use an extractor to get all the honey from the frame. The extractor is a little machine that you put the frames into and it spins really fast so all the honey sticks to the sides and then drips down. After that, you have to filter the honey to make sure you don't get any beeswax with it. To do this, you need a little mosquito net strainer.

After all the honey has filled the bucket, you jar it up and you have honey! They say that the darker the honey, the more valuable because that means it was harvested locally. I guess that means we got some pretty great honey!

 I learned so much and I have so much respect for bees now. They are crazy hard workers! They literally have a little colony and they choose who is going to be queen and when the queen is sick, they make a new bee the queen. Queen Bees are just fertile bees. Drones are the male bees and their only purpose is to mate with the queen and then they die. Worker bees are all females who are not fertile. When the bees make a queen, they eat some honey and then regurgitate it onto the larvae to give it more nutrients and create a queen bee. The stuff they throw up is called royal jelly and people buy it and turn it into pills and take it! Apparently there is a HUGE market for royal jelly. And I guess it tastes like yogurt too.. I don't want to know why original bee keepers thought it was a good idea to eat bee throw up but whatever. On our walk back home, we pass this: 

Fiji is so gorgeous and I am so excited to see what other projects we get to do with Saraswati. Next week we will be learning how to make coconut oil so stay tuned!