Harvesting honey Previous Next Hermann Fuhrer is a pensioner and beekeeping is his hobby. "When I visit my bees, I like to see if they are flying around and that everything is alright. The bees prefer humid and hazy conditions. That's when they work best and bring back plenty of pollen from the forest." Pictures and text: Christoph Balsiger, swissinfo swissinfo.ch "To protect myself from bee stings, I wear cheap kitchen gloves. Cigar smoke keeps the insects away so I can work without being bothered. I don't wear a hood because the bees' poison hasn't been a problem for me for a long time." swissinfo.ch "I own nine beehives. There are over 50,000 bees in each hive. They belong to the Carnica breed and are from former Yugoslavia originally. My bees are good-natured." swissinfo.ch "I use the pliers to pull out the racks of honeycomb and then I brush off the bees." swissinfo.ch "I take the racks in a box to the basement of my house." swissinfo.ch "I remove the wax from the honeycomb carefully so the honey will drain properly. I'm in fact stealing the bees' winter supplies, so I give them sugared water to make up for it. They use the water to make honey of lesser quality for their own use." swissinfo.ch "I can put six racks into my old extractor. I still do everything by hand." swissinfo.ch "When I extract the honey, I can hear the drops hitting the side. It sounds just like rain." swissinfo.ch "Forest honey is dark and flows slowly, has a mild taste and plenty of aroma." swissinfo.ch "This year I collected 160 kilogrammes of forest honey, so it was a good harvest. Most times, you get a bad year after a good one, so next time I might not get anything. You can't control honey production, you have to let Nature run its course." swissinfo.ch Picture 1 Picture 2 Picture 3 Picture 4 Picture 5 Picture 6 Picture 7 Picture 8 Picture 9 Picture 10 This content was published on November 30, 2004 - 14:03 You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us! If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.