How do combs become brown and stain honey?
Contributed by Brother Williams.
He says,
Honey will absorb both color and flavor from the comb it is stored in.
Bees that forage on the same blooms, but store the nectar/honey in different comb (light, freshly produced wax versus dark, old comb) will seemingly produce honey from two different sources.
This is not the case, as the honey in the dark comb will become darker by absorbing some of the stain from the old comb. Along with this color change comes a taste change as well. Old, dark colored comb has very little wax in it. It is dark because it has been used as brood-comb for several generations of brood.
When the bee is in the larval stage it goes through 6 stages of molt, where the larval skin is shed. after the new bee emerges following pupation, the nurse bees begin cleaning the now unoccupied cell to prepare it for the queen to use again to lay an egg in. The "cleaner bee" can only remove 3 - 4 of the molted shed-skins, so to keep the diameter of the cell at a size that is usable by the queen, the worker bees remove wax, rather than the molted skins.
This causes the comb to appear a little darker in color with each successive generation of brood that is produced in the comb,eventually becoming almost black. This is one reason for an 'off" taste in the honey. It was stored in cells that were lined with , essentially, dead bee-skins.
Eventually the cells will become unusable due to their ever-decreasing diameter. The cells will lose their shape-definition, and although the outside of the cell will still appear hexagonal, the inside will be round, with no definition to hexagonal angles.
Contributed by Brother Williams.
He says,
Honey will absorb both color and flavor from the comb it is stored in.
Bees that forage on the same blooms, but store the nectar/honey in different comb (light, freshly produced wax versus dark, old comb) will seemingly produce honey from two different sources.
This is not the case, as the honey in the dark comb will become darker by absorbing some of the stain from the old comb. Along with this color change comes a taste change as well. Old, dark colored comb has very little wax in it. It is dark because it has been used as brood-comb for several generations of brood.
When the bee is in the larval stage it goes through 6 stages of molt, where the larval skin is shed. after the new bee emerges following pupation, the nurse bees begin cleaning the now unoccupied cell to prepare it for the queen to use again to lay an egg in. The "cleaner bee" can only remove 3 - 4 of the molted shed-skins, so to keep the diameter of the cell at a size that is usable by the queen, the worker bees remove wax, rather than the molted skins.
This causes the comb to appear a little darker in color with each successive generation of brood that is produced in the comb,eventually becoming almost black. This is one reason for an 'off" taste in the honey. It was stored in cells that were lined with , essentially, dead bee-skins.
Eventually the cells will become unusable due to their ever-decreasing diameter. The cells will lose their shape-definition, and although the outside of the cell will still appear hexagonal, the inside will be round, with no definition to hexagonal angles.
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