Most rendering companies are known to commercial beekeepers solely through word-of-mouth, but there are a few that advertise their services primarily through national beekeeping journals and the internet. One such company is Beelite Beeswax Recovery, run by third generation beekeeper, Tim Trescott and his family currently located in Burnsville, North Carolina. In those days they only rendered their own wax, but their operation was wiped out when the tracheal mite spread throughout the U.
Stanley Trescott started a rendering business at that time figuring that there was a lot of business to be had as other beekeepers also lost hives to the mite and wanted to save their combs from being destroyed by wax moths. While the hand-crank press that his father used for many years was adequate at the time, Tim felt that it was too much work so after getting some ideas from a fellow beekeeper, Lavern Prettyman of Florida, he designed his own hydraulic presses using old freight train pistons.
In he started a candle making business, Beelite Candles, in New York, and then ended up retiring from wax rendering in , selling off his Florida and New York rendering businesses to other beekeepers. After a few years his candle business plateaued, so he built himself some new wax presses and began to offer rendering services again in out of his home in Burnsville. Tim will render wax and return the wax to the beekeeper for a small, per-pound fee, do the job for a percentage of the wax, or pay the beekeeper for all the wax recovered during rendering.
Beelite Beeswax Recovery utilizes a large melting tank partially filled with water to melt down beeswax cappings, combs and slum gum collected from beekeepers throughout the country. The melted mess is then hand bailed into bags which are placed in the presses. He uses four hydraulic presses to separate the wax from the other debris before pumping the wax through a one micron filter at psi. Tim Trescott and two of the hydraulic wax presses he built using old train pistons. While his beeswax operation typically renders about 50, pounds of beeswax in a year, Tim says he is a small operation and that there are somewhere between one-to-two dozen operations scattered around the U.
As Tim puts it, he would like to grow enough to have some influence in the industry. If you are up for making beeswax candles, there is a market for that. Two other things that can be harvested from beehives are pollen and propolis. Bees collect pollen from flowers and bring them back to the hive.
If you instal a pollen trap on your hive you can harvest and sell pollen. Propolis is a resin like substance made by bees to fill holes and cracks in the hive.
Like pollen, propolis is a health supplement that is harvested by using a propolis trap. Another way beekeeping is profitable is by using the bees for pollination services. In fact, some beekeepers only practice migratory beekeeping , in which they travel around the country pollinating various crops. Migratory beekeeping is extremely important to farmers, so these beekeepers make a good amount of money for their services. While migratory beekeepers manage hundreds of beehives at a time, hobby beekeepers can partake in pollination for profit as well.
Smaller farms would require just a few hives to pollinate their crops, so a hobby beekeeper would be ideal for this. How profitable is beekeeping? Depending on how many hives you have, you can make a profit. However, it really depends on the season and nectar flow. There are start up costs when getting into beekeeping. Honeybees collect nectar and store it as honey in their hives. Nectar and honey provide the energy for the bees flight muscles and for heating the hive during the winter.
Honey bees also collect pollen which supplies protein for the brood to grow. Centuries of selective breeding by humans has created honeybees that produce far more honey than the colony needs. Beekeepers, also known as apiarists, harvest the honey.
Honey is a sweet and viscous fluid produced by bees from the nectar of flowers. Bees visit these flowers in order to collect the nectar but in the process, also pollinate plants. The definition of honey stipulates a pure product that does not allow for the addition for any other substance. This includes, but is not limited to, water or other sweeteners. Honey is significantly sweeter than table sugar and has attractive chemical properties for baking.
Honey has a distinctive flavour which lead some people to prefer it over sugar and other sweeteners. Liquid honey does not spoil.
Because of its high sugar concentration it kills bacteria by plasmolysis. Natural airborne yeasts cannot become active in it because the moisture content is too low. The main uses of honey are in cooking, baking, spreading on bread or toast, and as an addition to various beverages such as tea.
Because honey is hygroscopic drawing moisture from the air , a small quantity of honey added to a pastry recipe will retard staling. Raw honey also contains enzymes that help in its digestion, several vitamins, and antioxidants.
Beeswax is secreted by honey bees of a certain age in the form of thin scales. The scales are produced by glands of 12 to 17 days old worker bees on the ventral stomach surface of the abdomen. Worker bees have eight wax-producing glands on the inner sides of the sternites the ventral shield or plate of each segment of the body. Wax is produced from abdominal segments. The size of these wax glands depends on the age of the worker.
Honey bees use the beeswax to build honey comb cells in which the young are raised and honey and pollen are stored. Approximately eight pounds of honey is consumed by bees to produce one pound of beeswax 0. When beekeepers go to extract the honey, they cut off the wax caps from each honeycomb cell.
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