Humor and fun scientific information highlighted the guest speaker’s presentation at the Indianola Rotary Club on Tuesday.
Frances Royal of Royal Honey of Midnight shared, “I started beekeeping about three years ago because I’m science-weird that way. Beekeeping is a big business but I make just enough money to buy new equipment and move on to the next task.
Royal Honey is what the owner called a boutique business because depending on the time of year and the vegetation nearby bees’ honey tastes different with each extraction.
In addition to providing honey, Royal Honey also sells beeswax and royal jelly. The business also provides beekeeper boxes for local farmers to help pollinate crops and services when bees become a nuisance.
“I remember when I was called to do my first extraction,” she recalled. “I was excited until I had to go up into a tree with a 10-foot ladder and a 16-pound box below me and I still hadn’t touched a bee yet.”
“I got called to this business,” Royal showed during her slide presentation. “And I took my bee vac, sucked those babies up and took them on home with me.”
This entertaining expose delved into the social habits and mating patterns of bees as well as a peek into the SUV of a beekeeper. Beekeepers have equipment that assist them in scraping honey from the comb, smoke producing equipment to calm them, beekeeper suits, food-grade collection buckets and bottles for finished products.
“There are three divisions inside the hive – the queen, female worker bees, and the drones, which are all males,” Royal explained. “The drones live to eat honey and reproduce. Bees literally populate themselves out of their hives at which time they democratically divide into half and the queen goes to another location with the other half of the hive. They also kick all of the drones out by fall. Drones that don’t find a queen to mate with go back to a drone congregation area.”
Royal educated the group about the nuances of honey. Towards the end of her presentation, she put up a slide rhetorically asking, “How do you know if you have real honey, if you don’t know your local beekeeper?” The point was that even products marketed in big box stores as local honey might in fact be an adulterated version of honey with additives and processes that take away from its medicinal properties. “I read that about 70% of honey sold in the United States is not pure honey,” Royal said. “Real honey has antioxidant and antibiotic properties that help with respiratory and sinus issues. Also, a bee sting is good for temporary relief of arthritis and inflammation.”
