Institute teachers tour Adee Honey Farms' storage warehouse. Honey is stored in 55-gallon drums while beeswax is melted down into 40 lbs. bricks. The drums of honey are sold when market prices for honey are favorable while the beeswax is used for everything from candle making to wax coatings on a variety of materials.
by Spencer Cody
Edmunds Central Science teacher
Twenty-nine teachers from 15 school districts across South Dakota participated in the Honey Production Education Institute Friday and Saturday, Aug. 23 and 24 in Roscoe thanks to funding from a Specialty Crop Block grant through the USDA.
The attending teachers spent the two days learning about how bees produce honey and wax commercially and the important role honey production plays in our nation's food supply.
On Friday the group toured the Adee Honey Farms plant in Roscoe where nearly 40,000 bee colonies will be processed for honey production...that's roughly two percent of all the bees in the country!
This institute picks up where the Queening Institute left off in March when Adee's bees were undergoing queening and hive splitting to replenish hive numbers lost over the previous year. Those same hives were transported up to South Dakota in May for honey production.
This year Adee's Roscoe plant started extracting honey about the second week of August. Honey extraction will continue through the month of September into October when the colonies are prepared for their long trip to California to ultimately be staged for the almond pollination in February, which was covered during the Pollination Institute held in February.
After the plant tour, teachers followed an Adee field crew to learn about the extraction process during a bee yard site visit. The whole extraction process is geared toward efficiency in managing hundreds of bee yard sites spanning 200 miles from Aberdeen to Eagle Butte. As honey extraction winds down, bee colonies will be fed syrup to prepare them for transportation to California.
On Saturday the institute visited the educational apiary that Edmunds Central maintains at Boulder Colony near Hosmer. During their visit teachers participated in many aspects of working bees while pulling frames of honey. The group brought back the first frames of honey of the season for the apiary and participated in the decapping, spin extraction, and filtering of the honey at the school in Roscoe. Each teacher took home a jar of honey they extracted during the institute.
A special thanks to Adee Honey Farms for their continued support of honey bee education in schools across the state. Their hosting of our group made this institute possible!
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