The four quarter days are:

• Lady day or the Feast of the Annunciation 25th March;
• Midsummer’s day around 25th June;
• Michaelmas 29th September;
• Christmas 25th December – lest we forget. Fat chance.

They all approximately coincide with either an equinox or a solstice.

Equinoxes

An equinox is when day and night are of equal duration. There are two of them – spring and autumn:

• Spring equinox 21st March;
• Autumn equinox 23rd September.

Solstices

As for the solstices there are two of these too – summer and winter.

• Summer solstice (longest day and shortest night) 21st June;
• Winter solstice (shortest day and longest night) 22nd December.

Christmas

Nobody knows the day or the month when Jesus Christ was actually born. However, the Feast of the Annunciation falls on the 25th March which is when Christians celebrate the day Gabriel called on Mary to tell her she was to be the mother of the son of God.

Imagine that!

Christmas is exactly 9 months after the Feast of the Annunciation. That’s biology for you.

Christmas also coincides approximately with the Winter Solstice on 22nd December. Also known as The Shortest Day. Now there’s cause to celebrate.

Christmas Traditions

You don’t need me to tell you about the ‘traditions’ of Christmas. Suffice to say, it is cruel that we have to bear it in the middle of the darkest, wettest and most depressing time of the year. It’s enough to push you over the edge!

We can never really know what Jesus might think about Christmas traditions, However, we do know what happened when he discovered the merchants had set up shop in the temple, so we can guess:

‘But what about the bees?’ says you…

Us beekeepers are fortunate because there is a lot of stuff out there to be getting on with at christmas.

Treat them

The bees should have been fed and treated for Varroa after the honey was extracted at the end of summer. However, midwinter is the time when the queen bees should be off lay and there should be a short broodless period which is ideal for a backup treatment with Oxalic acid. I say should be because it is not always the case especially in a mild year or where they ivy bloomed late. So long as there has been a bit of cold weather – below 15 degrees – and a decent interval since you last saw yellow ivy pollen going in to the hives – Christmas should be perfect.

Click here for how to do that.

Click here for more about Oxalic acid for Beekeepers.

I should add that midwinter treatment may not be necessary if you are confident that the conditions in autumn were good enough to allow your thymol/MAQS to work properly.

Feed them

While you are out there – check the feed status of your bees. Heft the hives to assess the weight and if they seem light put some fondant on. It won’t do any harm and if they need it later – it’s there.

If the bees seem weak and are clustering close to the top of the frames you could choose to remove the crownboard and place the fondant directly onto the bees where they will find it easily. If you do this – add an eke and pack the space around the fondant with old jumpers, sacking or some other cosy stuff.

Don’t put pollen substitute on yet – too early – wait for February.

Apiary Watch

Make sure the hive roofs are weighted down with stones or tied with ropes – winter has hardly started and there could be gales. And there could be animals.

Maintenance

Mend broken equipment. Treat spare boxes if they need it. Make up new stuff but don’t put wax into new frames till spring or it will just lose its fragrance and go all crispy then the bees won’t work it properly – they’ll draw all that abstract stuff with holes and buttresses.

All your equipment, supers, spare brood boxes etc could all do with a good scrape down – propolis flakes off well in the cold weather.  Save all the little bits of beeswax you will be amazed how it mounts up.

Click here for how to tackle your beeswax mountain.

Strip down old frames with black, knackered or holy wax. Holy wax is comb with holes in it. Burn the really black horrible wax – use if for lighting fires that’s the only thing it’s good for.

Save the paler, cleaner wax and render it:

Click here for how to render beeswax.

Then do something interesting with it but take care not to set fire to yourself:

Click here for beeswax polish recipe

Click here for beeswax lipbalm recipe

Click here for beeswax handcream recipe

Click here for candle making

Click here for soap making

Wax Moth

If you are storing used brood frames and you know you have a  wax moth problem you might like to take this opportunity to treat them with acetic acid. Acetic acid is not the stuff you put on your chips – treat it with respect.

Click here for how to do that thing

There is also a biological control agent from Vita which uses a micro-organism to attack wax moth.  The product is called Certan and the micro-organism is called Bacillus thuringiensis.

Click here for Certan information

Christmas Forage

There is very little floral forage out there for the bees at Christmas. This year there is quite a lot of gorse in bloom. In some years there may be the dregs of the ivy. Also some winter garden plants such as Mahonia or even snowdrops.

• Ivy pollen is yellow
• Gorse is orange/brown
• Snowdrops pollen is orange/brown too
• Click here for more about ivy
• Click here for how to take a crop of ivy honey.

Happy New Year!

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2017.  All Rights Reserved.

Earlier this week my hive monitors raised 2 causes for concern plus a puzzle.

Here’s the graph. Click it for a close-up:

Key

• The two uppermost lines are plots of the brood nest temperature in two hives at a distant apiary – green = Hive 1, yellow = Hive 2;
• The black line is the hive scale under Hive 2;
• The pink line is the ambient temperature (outside the hive).

As you can see from the pink line, the weather has been chilly for all of April, rarely above 10 degrees, so opening hives has been out of the question.

The comforting part – up until the 8th or 9th April was that despite the cold weather – the temperature in the brood nests of both hives was well above ambient and pretty steady.

Also – the weight of hive 2 was only going down very slowly. Nothing to worry about there.

However…

Concerns

1. Around 5th April the green line started to fall suggesting something amiss with the queen in Hive 1;
2. The weight of stores in Hive 2 is steadily going down – there was a 5 kg drop  in the last month and that’s 11lb which ever way you look at it. How much of the remaining 27kgs was stores and how much was the weight of the hive?
3. Hive 1 is running a degree or so cooler than Hive 2. This could be a quirk in the works or something else… what though… That’s the puzzle.

Fortunately the weather improved slightly this week permitting a hive inspection.

Hive 1

• One yr old Queen present and laying;
• The reason for the dip in temperature was that the brood nest had moved away from the probe, leaving it stranded at the chilly perimeter;
• Apart from that there is no obvious reason why this colony should have a cooler brood nest than hive 2.

Hive 2

• In this hive is a 3 year old queen – very strong;
• Plenty of stores so no need to worry about that;
• In fact – it needs a super.

Brood nest temperature and the Native Bee.

The gap on the graph between the two brood nest temperature plots is probably an anomaly but is interesting if it isn’t.

The best thing to do would be for me to swap the two monitors to test it. If they continue more or less the same then there is a quirk in the system. If they cross over then Hive 1 really is running cooler than the other.

Lower brood nest temperature could be a characteristic of native bees and monitoring might be a way of picking them out. It just so happens that the queen in Hive 1 is a queen I bred and reared here. The queen in Hive 2 isn’t.

What next?

Rightly or wrongly I clipped the blue queen in Hive – after all it was quite warm and the bees were calm. If I have damaged her then it will show in the brood nest temperature.

It remains to be seen if the bees actively more the nest away from the sensor again.

I can continue to monitor the weight of Hive 2 from this distance and now that I’ve hefted them I know they can lose another 5kg before I need to worry.

Conclusions

Remote hive monitors can give reassuring information but there are limits.

You need to know:

• the baseline;
• that the  sensors continue to be correctly positioned;
• the monitors are functioning properly or you will get false alarms.

Click here for How to Set up your Arnia Monitors

Click here for How Install your Arnia Monitors

Click here for more about Remote Bee Hive Monitoring and applications

Click here for Arnia website

Click here for a video overview of the Basic Hive Scale

Click here for video instructions on how to assemble your Basic Scale

Click here for How to Make your own Scale Hive

Click here for Bees, Honey and a Scale Hive

Click here for Useful Arnia Hive Scale Data

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2016.  All Rights Reserved.

Click it for a close up:

So what does this tell us?

Well it tells me I don’t have to worry just yet. Here’s why:

Indoors

Before the 7th March all of this kit was in here, in the house with me where I could look at it and try and get my head round it.

The Hive Scale monitor – khaki line – was in the conservatory while the other monitor and the Gateway unit was mainly in the kitchen where the mobile signal is strongest.

In both rooms the temperature rises during the day and falls during the night. The differences between them should tell you that the conservatory is warmer than the kitchen – and it is. Except when I’m cooking in the evening which is where the temperatures recorded by the monitors in the kitchen peak and cross the khaki line.  On days when this didn’t happen and the temperature in the kitchen remained below that of the conservatory even in the evenings – I was probably in the pub instead of cooking.

Outdoors

During the 7th March everything was moved outside for a trial run before introducing it to the bees. As you can see, the temperature recorded by all the units plummeted from mid-day onwards on the 7th as they spent the night together in the garden.  For a brief period there, you can contrast the temperature in my house to the temperature outside – 3 or 4 degrees difference in the night time troughs only.

Bees

On the 8th I installed everything into one of my apiaries.

The data tells us several things:

• The brood nest temperature of both hives is around 34 degrees so each of the colonies has a nest full of brood and a laying queen – probably;
• One hive is recording a slightly higher temperature. Either I’ve got the probe slightly off centre or there is an anomaly with one of the monitors;
• Remarkably, the bees keep their brood nests at a near constant 34 degrees despite the peaks and troughs in the ambient temperature, despite both being on open mesh floors;
• The insides of both hives are very much warmer than my house – even when I’m cooking.

Stores

The black line is  the Hive Scale showing the weight of stores. When I installed it I know that hive was good and heavy – so as long as there is no dramatic dip in that line I shouldn’t need to worry about stores. However, it is March, they have a good queen and they will be turning stores into larvae and bees. As soon as the temperatures improve I will have to go and check them.

Theft

Arnia monitors will also send alerts if hives are moved either by thieves or overturned by animals or weather. I have received no alerts so can assume all is well up there.

Conclusions

• I know that both of my monitored hives have laying queens and functioning brood nests. I can only guess about the others at this time of the year before I have begun my inspections;
• I know that the bees with the Hive Scale are doing well for stores;
• I know that neither of those two hives have been either knocked over or stolen. I can only guess about the bees at other apiaries;
• I know the the bees in both of the monitored hives are much warmer than I am right now.

Click here for How to Set up your Arnia Monitors

Click here for How Install your Arnia Monitors

Click here for more about Remote Bee Hive Monitoring and applications

Click here for Arnia website

Click here for a video overview of the Basic Hive Scale

Click here for video instructions on how to assemble your Basic Scale

Click here for How to Make your own Scale Hive

Click here for Bees, Honey and a Scale Hive

Click here for Remote Hive Monitoring Action

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2016.  All Rights Reserved.

Well the globe is certainly heating up, but not here at the wet end of Europe so forget long sunny days and a grape vine in the garden; for us, climate change means the same old stuff – wind and rain – but more of it.

But how will climate change affect our bees?

The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC)

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United Nations and World Meteorological Organisation to bring clarity to the issue of climate change.

The IPCC does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters.  Instead, thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary and non-governmental basis. Based in Geneva, the IPCC aims to reflect a range of views and expertise and currently 195 countries are contributors.

Climate change reports are released periodically and the latest – the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report was published in 2014.

If you have read the Fifth Assessment Report – you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din. It’s in the region of 30 chapters and 1500 pages!

However, if you want to read them, they are all available for download at this address https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml#1

IPCC Conclusions

Here in north western Europe we can expect:

• Warmer but wetter summers;
• Milder winters;
• Increases in extreme weather events;
• More and worse flooding;
• Sea level rises;
• Shift in climatic zones may cause extinctions of some species and invasions by others.

So how will this affect our bees?

Wetter summers

The warming of the earth’s oceans means that more water evaporates into the atmosphere. When the prevailing winds reach land the air rises and cools and the water in the air condenses forming clouds. So although the summers might be slightly warmer year on year, they will be cloudier and rainier.

Effects on Foraging

Wet weather makes it more difficult or impossible for bees to forage. They either don’t go out at all or when they do – everything is wet. Open faced flowers facing upwards such as dandelions and hawthorn fill with water – the pollen is soaked and the nectar is washed away.

Effects on Queen mating

As we know, queen bees mate with drones on the wing in drone congregation areas. When weather is wet, neither drones nor queens will fly out to mate. Unless of course they are native Irish honey bees – they are used to it.

Also, virgin queen bees mature 4-8 days after emergence. After this they have two weeks to mate successfully. That’s not to say that some sort of chitinaceous biological door slams shut making the physical act impossible. They can still mate for a time but it becomes less and less likely that they will mate well. Such queens can start to lay but they will probably fizzle out quite quickly – sound familiar?

So long periods of wet weather add yet another obstacle to a successful outcome.

Click here for a queen rearing timeline

Let’s not forget the functioning of that insect barn dance (drone congregation area) is already compromised by the ravages of Varroa on the wild populations of honey bees.

Miscellaneous

Bees confined to hives for long periods of time means bees rubbing shoulders more, so viruses and microbial / fungal diseases are more effectively distributed by Varroa and proximity.

They are also effectively more congested and we all know what congestion does to bees don’t we? Yes, they’ll swarm.

And of course we humans beeing know all about wet summers. It means watching the Met Eireann Rainfall Radar for a gap in the clouds and trying to look after bees with the rain beating on your back.

Milder Winters

Countries in the north of Europe have experienced a rise in winter temperatures and there has been a reduction in the number of frosty days. This is not helpful either.

Thermoregulation

Generally – the colder the winter – the better the bees come through it. In the very cold winters of 2010 and 2011 where heavy snow fell and stayed put for weeks and temperatures dropped to minus 18C my bees scarcely seemed to notice. Bees are well able to thermoregulate. They cluster tightly and activity is reduced to communal shivering which produces enough heat to sustain them. The bees in the cluster constantly churn – taking turns on the outside. In this low-activity state they use very little of their stores.

The cost of mild winters

In mild winters, bees can be quite active and may produce brood all the way through. This is not necessarily a good thing!

When they do this – they are of course burning more stores – including pollen. If a mild winter is followed by a long cold spring they can be in trouble and in fact this is what happened in the winter of 2012 /2013.

The wind went into the east in the spring and the weather turned very cold. The bees totally failed to work the willow – in fact the catkins here went black and fell off in the cold. Instead of building up on the willow pollen which is what usually happens – colonies dwindled to tiny clusters which then ‘starved in the midst of plenty’. In other words, they had lots of stored honey but the clusters were so small, the bees became isolated from them. Despite spring feeding with pollen substitutes my winter losses that year were 50%.

Fortunately the summer of 2013 was very good and I was able to build up to full strength again by the end of the year and get a decent amount of honey into the bargain. If instead the summer had been like 2012, which was like the ones forecast by climate change it would have been a different story.

Disease

Mild winters can also mean more disease for example, chalkbrood which thrives in damp conditions. A good cold winter can make things like these grind to a halt. While I think of it, a good cold winter will also bring wax moth to a halt.

In a mild winter when there is no gap in brood rearing Varroa will also be able to reproduce albeit at a low level. This can lead to a Varroa epidemic come spring if mid-winter treating is neglected. It is thought that natural breaks in brood production such as after a swarm or in midwinter help the bees control Varroa. Adult mites can survive for a time on adult bees but some fall off and some bees are able to detect and remove them.

Mild winters also have implications for another mite – Tropilaelaps. This mite has not got to Ireland – yet – but if it did get here climate change could allow it to be another disaster. Tropilaelaps builds up much more quickly than Varroa and can decimate a honey bee colony in no time. The Achilles heel of this mite is that its mouth-parts are not strong enough to pierce the chitin exoskeleton of an adult bee which means they cannot overwinter in colonies that have a broodless period. Need I say more?

Wasps

Wasps are a bane at the end of summer when their robbing activities can destroy nucs and small colonies not to mention Apideas. This autumn has been unusually mild which has been good for the bees in one respect – the ivy flow has been tremendous. On the other hand – the wasps are going on and on, with many active nests to be seen along hedgebanks.  They seem to have established a routine of robbing and the bees seem to be letting them away with it!

After such a heavy ivy flow, the impact of this will probably be negligible but ivy flows cannot be relied upon and wasps could become a more serious pest and a real threat to wintering bees if climate change continues.  And it will of course.

Extreme Weather Events

More extreme weather events are predicted as part of climate change. In this part of the world that means the full spectrum of wind and rain from squalls to hurricanes.

Squalls

The summer of 2012 was atrocious. It soon settled into an endless series of squally showers interspersed with bursts of brilliant sunshine. Striped weather.

Squally summer downpours are particularly damaging to the bees because they are serially ambushed. What happens is this:

• Sun comes out;
• Bees dash out foraging;
• Vicious downpour comes;
• Bees run for home;
• Some bees are overtaken by shower and are knocked out of the sky;
• The rest come home in a great crowd and can’t physically get in through the door and are dashed to the floor in a wet lump.

Queens out on mating flights may not come home – dashed out of the sky. In the summer of 2012 it was almost impossible to get queens mated properly and they fizzled out midwinter. This contributed to the crushing losses that winter.

Hurricanes

Speaking of crushing losses – when hurricanes come in the winter, hives are all roped down so if trees or branches fall or if the wind blows them over, they will stay roped together till the beekeeper comes to the rescue. If storms start to come outside winter then there could be more of this sort of stuff.

Even if falling trees miss your hives, they can break fences then there are cattle. Or horses.

Flooding and Sea Level Rises

If your bees are close to the sea, watercourses or set in hollows – best think again. All that rain will flood areas that never flooded before.

When choosing a new apiary site – the possibility of flooding should be seriously considered.

Climatic Zone Shift

Climatic zones are expected to shift with climate change. This could bring all sorts of pestilence and plague.

Invasive Species

Here in Ireland we are at the limits of the natural climatic range of the honey bee. We can see the problems that worsening weather can cause our bees. They won’t be extincted because we will be here – for a while anyway – to look after them. However, if the climate here becomes acceptable to invasive species be sure they will get here one way or another.

In the not too distant future we could be looking at small hive beetle, Tropilaelaps mites, Giant Asian hornets Vespa mandarinia and woodpeckers.

Giant hornets can take out entire colonies of honey bees. Green woodpeckers are a pest in the UK where they can peck right through a wintering hive.

We all know about the spread of Small Hive Beetle. If not, click here

Honey flows

Bees and flowering plants evolved together within relatively settled climatic zones. Many flowering plants have become dependent on bees for pollination and vice versa; the flowering times are often synchronised with insect population dynamics to the benefit of both parties. Climate change could effectively maroon these relationships in a climatic zone which will not play ball. Plants may be triggered to come into bloom too early or too late meanwhile the bee populations may peak to take advantage of an expected floral fiesta that happened a month ago – in the rain. The mismatch possibilities are endless.

Late Bloomers

Ivy is very important to honey bees in Ireland. They work it throughout the late summer/early autumn and build up quantities of winter stores. This year (2015) the ivy was late compared to the previous two years. In lowland apiaries, heavy ivy flows were recorded but up the hill a bit with slightly colder/wetter weather little ivy honey was was brought in. Last year (2014) the ivy came into bloom very early and the bees worked it like mad bringing in huge crops for the winter. Variation in flowering times is nothing new, but in league with the approach of winter and ever increasing rainfall, late flowering may come to mean no crop and no autumn build up.

Early Bloomers

Sycamore, horse chestnut and dandelion provide very important early flows for the bees. Squally weather when the sycamore and horse chestnuts are in bloom strips the flowers off the trees. Dandelions face upwards and get washed out. Willow is a very important early source of pollen and we know what happened to that in the spring of 2013.

Whether the Weather

Keeping bees is fraught with difficulties – we all know them, there’s Varroa and there are other diseases, there are pesticides and habitat loss, queenlessness, drone layers, laying workers and in-breeding. We can just about cope with all of these things in the weather of an average year.

To see just how influential the weather is, then we only need to remember the summer of 2012 (when weather was so vile it felt like a vendetta) and compare it with the lovely summer of 2014 (when the weather did what weather is supposed to do).

2012

Wall to wall queenlessness, drone layers, laying workers you name it, followed by 50% losses the following spring.

2014

Most of the problems beekeepers face year on year simply ceased to be problems at all plus historic bumper honey crop.

2018

We had the heatwave. It was wonderful – temperatures hit the 30’s and it didn’t rain for 2 months. There was a honey harvest to beat all honey harvests and queens were going out getting mated just for the fun of it.

Conclusion

It’s bad weather that makes all of our problems serious now.  So multiply our weather problems in the shitty years by ten and there’s the future for honey bees with climate change

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2015.  All Rights Reserved.

Here’s a hectic picture of lots of pollen hurtling into the scale hive today.

• The yellow pollen loads are willow.
• The brown pollen loads are gorse.

Click the photo for a better view.

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2014.  All Rights Reserved.

There is no perfect site for bees but there are points to consider – some affect the summering and some affect the wintering. It’s all swings and roundabouts (or snakes and ladders) with bees.

Accessibility

If not in the beekeeper’s garden, the prospective site needs to be accessible by the beekeeper and a vehicle of some description – be that a wheelbarrow or a van – in order to place the hives and to remove the honey later. There’s a thing called a Scottish carrier which you can make from a couple of broomsticks and some 2×1. It  defies description but you operate it like a highland sedan chair – a person each end and a stack of supers in the middle. The heavier the load the tighter the grip – I’ve never known it to slip however jauntily you trot through the heather.

Food and Water

For the bees it will need to be close to sources of nectar, pollen and water, throughout the season (unless the beekeeper intends to migrate the hives) or they will be unable to produce much honey and may even starve. They will forage for up to 3 miles but that’s a long way to go for your bread and butter. Starvation is unlikely but can happen in upland areas where forage is in short supply and the season is that much shorter.

The Elements

Assuming that these basic requirements are satisfied, the site should be neither too damp nor situated in a frost pocket and it should also be sheltered from strong winds.

Ideally the hives would face east or south to catch the early morning sun and not be under trees as some beekeepers believe that the heavy dripping of water from the trees onto the roofs of the hives can make the bees irritable and such sites are often damp. On the other hand, some of the most productive apiaries I’ve ever seen were in under dense canopies of trees.

A little winter sunshine is very beneficial to the bees but too much sun in the summer will make them swarm. The obvious answer to this conundrum is to place them within the south facing edge of a deciduous wood where the bareness of the winter trees would allow the rays of the sun to hit the faces of the hives yet the fullness of the summer canopy of leaves would provide shade from the midday summer sun. Like this very productive site:

Neighbours

The final factor to consider is proximity to neighbours – equine or human because bees sting and stings or the results of them can be serious. They also swarm which could be viewed as a nuisance by neighbours depending on where they land. It is said that bees dislike horses and will sting without provocation; bolting horses can be dangerous to riders, traffic and spectators. Bee-stings can be painful to humans too and neighbours can be obnoxious, allergic and litigious. Insurance is essential and membership of the local beekeepers association also gives access to group insurance.

Vandals

The sight of a row of hives could prove irresistible to these, who will wreak havoc if they can so it is best that hives be sited out of sight of roads or footpaths. In short, the further from your fellow man the better.

In recent years, apiaries have been targeted by thieves. Bearing in mind that a full hive with a couple of supers is worth in the region of €500 or more this is hardly surprising.

Click here for some notes on a good Heather Site

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2014. All Rights Reserved.

They’re all over the Mahonia as well.

How do people get through winter without bees!

What is an enzyme?

Enzymes are large, complex, biochemically active molecules of protein – they could be described as ‘smart’. The names of enzymes always end in an ‘ase’ while the front part of the name gives some indication of action they carry out. Invertase, for example, splits sucrose molecules then inverts the free D-fructose into L-fructose.

What is the nature of enzyme activity

Enzymes are very specific in their activities because they each have specially shaped ‘active sites’ which lock on to certain target molecules and manipulate them in a particular way, or ways, so as to pull them apart.  All this takes place spontaneously and is brought about by the changing attractions between constituent molecules in the enzyme and in the target. The act of locking onto the target brings about changes in the enzyme which in turn break or alter the target in some way.

What affects enzyme activity

The rate and/or efficacy of enzyme activity can be affected by chemicals or by temperature or pH or by concentrations of target and/or resultant molecules all of which may change the shape of the active site. Also enzymes each have an optimum temperature at which they perform most effectively and above, or below, which the activity is impaired or reduced.

What happens when heat is applied?

What happens when heat is applied, is the enzyme starts to unravel. If the temperature continues to rise, the shape of the active site is changed or ‘denatured’ and at this point the enzyme is deactivated.  However, the deactivation of enzymes by heating is not necessarily permanent and once the temperature falls, the enzyme may return to its original shape and function as normal.

Only if the temperature substantially exceeds the denaturation point and is maintained for some time will the enzyme unravel to such an extent it cannot pull itself together again.  At this point the enzyme can be said to be permanently denatured and it will cease to function as a biochemical entity. The temperature tolerance of enzymes is variable.

Honey Enzymes and Temperature Tolerance

Enzymes in honey are of both bee and plant origin and include:

• Invertase which splits the sucrose found in nectars into D-glucose and D-fructose – also known as dextrose and levulose – sugars found in honey. Invertase is added to honey by the bees and its activity is thought to enhance the storage properties of honey by increasing the degree of possible sugar concentration. Invertase is relatively stable to 50 degrees C but the stability varies with the botanical origins of the honey.
• Amylase (alpha and beta) – alpha amylase splits a starch chain randomly into sugars but beta amylase breaks maltose from the ends. Amylases are thought to originate from pollen – its purpose, if any in honey is unknown. Stable to 50 degrees C but degrades gradually over a period of days at this temperature.
• Diastase is a name that is applied to both amylases when its presence in honey is to be assayed as a measure of the amount of heat a honey has been subjected to. It degrades  naturally over time but degradation is accelerated at temperatures above 50 degrees C for 5 days. Diastase also deteriorates with storage;
• Glucose oxidase originates in the pharyngeal glands of bees and oxidises glucose to gluconic acid, a by-product of this is hydrogen peroxide which has antibiotic properties. Before this discovery, the observed antibiotic effect was at one time attributed to the action of something named inhibine. Glucose oxidase is stable to 55 degrees C;
• Catalase and phosphatase are also present in honey.

If you are going to eat the  honey, the acids in your stomach will denature all the enzymes within seconds.

Click here for Irish Honey

Click here for Raw Honey

Click here for Honey Processing

Copyright © Beespoke.info, 2014. All Rights Reserved.

 Sources

Babacan, S. and Rand AG. Characterization of honey amylase. J Food Sci. 2007 Jan;72(1):C050-5.

Hooper,T. Guide to Bees and Honey. 1991 Blandford.

Karabournioti,S.and Zervalaki,P. The Effect of Heating on Honey HMF and Invertase. Apiacta, 2001, 36 (4), 177 – 181

Kretavičius, J.; Kurtinaitienė, B.; Račys, J.; Čeksterytė, V.    Inactivation of glucose oxidase during heat-treatment de-crystallization of honey. Žemdirbystė (Agriculture) 2010 Vol. 97 No. 4 pp. 115-122

White.J.W. Composition of Honey.  In Honey: A Comprehensive Survey. Ed. Eva Crane. Heinemann, London. 1975.