Honey
At Gatala Muhallebicisi we serve high quality polyflora flower honey from the high plateaus of the Taurus Mountains. We provide it from a reputable and reliable Agricultural Products Sales Cooperative that produces honey by ISO 22.000 system standards. As we live in a country so rich of this product, we aim to be able to offer more variety.
Honey is a rich sweet food made made by honey bees collecting nectar and other sweet juices from flowers, processing them with special substances of their own bodies, and storing the product in honeycombs of wax to mature. Bees fan their wings above the comb to evaporate excess water from honey; when the water content drops approximately to % 18, they seal off the cells of the honeycomb with wax. Honey is considered mature when about % 75 of the cells in the comb is closed in this way. No further waiting: it is time for collecting. As bees are irritable during this operation, honey collectors use mask and gloves, and a smoke is blown into the beehive to pacify them, first through the fly hole, then from above removing the top cover. Next, honeycombs with their wooden frames are placed over containers with the wax seals scratched and honey is drained.
There are three three kinds of honey produced in Turkey: Pine Honey, in Muğla and outskirts; Citrus Flower Honey in Antalya, İzmir and environs; and Flower Honey in other regions. With regard to honey production our country is self-sufficient, ranking 4th among the countries where honeycombs exist, 7th among honey producing countries with about 35.000 tonnes, and 18th among honey exporters.
A plant with deep roots and large branches growing at around 1200 m altitude endemic to Turkey is the valuable Geven, which both helps prevent erosion and has a key role in the maintanence of the whole ecological flora. Geven is a bush that has roots going down to 3-5 meters. It is important agent in bio-variety. Safeguard against erosion, it holds fast a block of land 2 to 4 times bigger then the actual surface it covers. Honey made in the lands where Geven bushes are abundant has anti-bacterial and anti-oxidizing properties. Geven honey is a source of energy readily absorbed into bloodstream. It promotes new blood. It is recommended to patients with heart problems as it bestows vitality to the cardial muscle.
Storing honey
If not to be consumed immediately, honey can be stored in tightly sealed air-proof jars in a dark cool place (10-14 degrees Celcius) away from all odours and moisture. It is preferably consumed within a year, even though it will keep much longer under optimal conditions. The eventual crystallization has nothing to do with the quality of honey. Depending on the kind, it is the proportion of the naturally occurring dextrose which determines how soon the honey crystallizes. For instance, it takes a little while for sunflower honey to crystallize, whereas Pine Honey does not crystallize at all. Crystallized honey can be placed with its jar in warm water in 45 degrees Celcius (not continuously heated) until it redissolves to regain its natural viscosity.
The bee family
A bee family is community of bees consisting of a few hundred male drone bees, thousands of workers and one queen bee. It is a community sharing the whole life and co-operating closely, a well-established peaceful society. Each family has a distinct odour of its own. Bees know each other by this odour and can find their way back home even if they are transported inside a closed box 5 kilometers away from their hives, thanks to this discriminative odour. The sex and the size of the members of the family is determined by the amount of royal jelly fed by worker bees to the larvae. The workers receive about 3 mg of it, the drone bees 10 mg, and the queen 350 mg. This explains why royal jelly is a rich food beneficial to humans as well.
There is only one queen in a bee family, whose job is to lay eggs to perpetuate the family. It is immediately recognizable by its long size, its more corpulent body and its gait. Fertilisation of the queen bee takes place outside of the hive, during a daily flight. The queen, fertilised by one or several male drone bees, lays eggs during all its 5-6 years' life. Before fertilisation, the virgin queen goes out for short exercises in flight to locate the hive. When the day comes, it is fertilised by the freely roaming male drone bees out in prairies. The fertilising male bee, obviously the strongest among its peers, falls dead of exhaustion after the act. A few more fertilisations is also possible in the same day. Then the queen goes back to the hive, also exhausted, received and carried in by the workers.
The queen lays eggs singly in cells of the comb. The male larvae hatch from eggs that the queen places in larger cells in the comb when food supply, i. e. pollen is abundant in the early spring. They have no sting to protect themselves, no proboscis to suck nectar from flowers, no baskets in their legs to carry pollen, and no bags in their bellies to make wax. They spend their short lives of 3-4 for months at leisure without concerns; they roam about in good whether, and come back to feed on the stored honey in the hive when hungry. Should there be a shortage of pollen and nectar sources, they are expelled by the workers from the hive, or isolated inside until they are starved to death. Worker bees are the tiniest and crowdiest members. A worker bee can carry a load up to its own weight. Upon birth, they immediately begin working in the hive, cleaning cells, feeding larvae, maintaining the queen bee, regulating hive temperature, brooding, and keeping the door. In spring they switch duties and go out to collect nectar and pollen, and die in about one month of their life outside. A worker bee sensing death gets away from the hive.
Rearch shows that the bees' contribution to plant fertilisation is up to seven times more valuable than the economic profit they bestow on us by all their products together (honey, honey wax, royal jelly, pollen, bee poison).
