Tea accessories and Savannah Bee

We were thrilled to meet the folks from Savannah Bee a few weeks ago. Great people great products. And what a nice addition to our tea accessories from Moonspoon.

Where does honey come from?

Sunlight is one of the most important ingredients in honey.  Sunlight is used by tupelo trees, orange trees, and sourwood trees to grow, produce flowers, and fill the flowers with nectar. Nectar is a sugary liquid that comes from flowers.

Plants use brightly colored flowers and sweet nectar to encourage pollinators like honeybees to fly into the flower where they collect nectar on their fuzzy bodies.

A pollen covered honeybee will then travel to the flowers of several other plants spreading the pollen it collects. This process is called cross pollination. Cross pollination is a very important part of the plants’ seed making process. Seeds are required to produce the next generation of plants.

The honeybee takes the nectar back to its home, a beehive. In the wild, honeybees make their beehives in any unoccupied empty space, like a hollow tree.

Beekeepers provide bees with hive boxes, usually made of wood, for the bees to make their home. Boxes can be stacked on boxes to provide more space as the colony grows. The place where a beekeeper keeps all of her hives is called an apiary.

Once a honeybee colony settles into a beekeeper’s beehive boxes, the colony will begin to grow. When the time is right, the Queen Bee will begin laying eggs. The Queen Bee is the parent of all of the new members of the colony. A honeybee colony can grow very fast because a Queen Bee can lay more than 1000 eggs a day!

The honeybees that visit flowers and collect nectar are called Worker Bees. When the Worker Bees return from the flowers, they deposit the nectar collected into little cells that are hexagon shaped spaces in the hive’s honeycomb. When the cell is full of nectar, other Worker Bees will fan the nectar with very fast moving wings. They do this to evaporate the water from the nectar creating honey.

When the hive boxes are full of honey and honeycomb, the beekeepers will remove the honeycomb and extract the honey.

The beekeepers will very carefully fill big barrels with their honey and send it to the Savannah Bee Company in Savannah, Georgia. Some of the bee keepers send the bee boxes with the honey still in the combs where it is  hand-cut and cleaned.

A beautiful tea strainer, assorted designs.