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Natural Raw Honey

Find natural raw honey for sale from Turin Family Farm. The TFF keeps approximately 12 colonies of ethically raised honeybees to produce sweet, golden, organic raw honey for our customers. Read on to explore the benefits of farm fresh honey, or shop now to enjoy our natural raw honey for yourself.

FARM FRESH HONEY

Our mission is to offer people an alternative to the industrial style packaging and treatment of honey, which applies heat and filtration to gain efficiency in packaging over the loss of pollen and enzyme content. Our honey costs more to package because we do not heat our honey to speed up the process. Our goal is to provide people with flower honey true to the floral sources considered local to the market areas served without blending to achieve a price point. At Turin Family Farm, we urge you to buy local, farm fresh honey from beekeepers wherever you find it.

All About Honey

Honey is the natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from the nectar of plants which bees collect and transform by substance of their own, deposit, dehydrate and store in the honeycomb. Turin Family Farm raises bees that produce natural raw honey, which we sell through in a variety of ways.

Floral honey is the result of the co-evolution of honeybees and flowering plants. Over the course of the millennia, trees and flowering plants have modified their leaves to become the petals of flowers and developed nectarines in an effort to attract honeybees to physically accomplish the pollen transfer necessary for their reproduction. For many species of plants, pollen attractiveness alone is sufficient cause to lure the honeybee visit. But even in these cases, leaf modification in color, number and orientation evolved in response to the honeybees vision and sense of smell.

Plants that offer nectar as well as pollen have an evolutionary advantage in the competition among flowers to achieve pollination from a relatively limited number of insects. Some examples include economically important crop plants like almonds, apples, blueberries and cranberries.

Nectar then contains sugar which becomes the attractant for the honeybee. The excessive water content of the nectar leaves it unstable in nature. Natural raw honey results when honeybees reduce the moisture of nectar to approximately 18%, which is a point at which honey can last indefinitely.

  As a honeybee develops, it goes through four distinct stages. Starting as an egg, within a few weeks it will have transformed into a larva, pupa, and finally, an adult.

In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at the lifecycle of a honeybee and how it varies depending on the caste.  

The phases of a bee’s development

Honey bees take different amounts of time to develop from an egg to adult bee, depending on their caste. The total development time is 16 days for queens, 21 days for worker bees, and 24 days for drones.

Phase 1: Egg

A queen bee can lay up to 3,000 eggs in a single day. Most of those will be fertilized to produce a worker bee, while the unfertilized will result in a drone. To produce a queen bee, she lays an egg in a queen cell.

A single egg that is the size of one grain of rice is laid in one of the hive’s hexagonal beeswax egg cells. While the egg lies upright for the first couple of days, by the third day it will fall to its side.

After three days, a honey bee egg will hatch to reveal a larva.

Phase 2: Larva

After three days of incubating, the egg hatches to reveal a larva. This small white grub has no sight or legs at this point.

To sustain the larvae, young nurse bees feed them royal jelly for the first 3-4 days. After that, the feeding regime changes depending on their caste.

• Queens      are fed royal jelly which is what enables them to become a queen.
• Female workers are      fed worker jelly containing less protein.
• Male drones are      fed drone jelly containing less protein.

Bees spend different amounts of time in the larva phase depending on their caste. Queens spend the least amount of time as larva while drones take the longest to progress through this stage. A larva will shed its skin (molt) several times as it grows.

Bee Caste                           Days spent as a larva    

Queen                                  Up to 5½ days

Worker                                 6 days            

Drone                                   6½ days

After around six days of larva development, a nurse bee will cap the cell by covering the opening in a layer of wax. This protective covering is in preparation for the pupa stage.  

Phase 3: Pupa

Throughout the pupa phase, the future bee is starting to take shape under the capping. It is still a tiny organism but is growing fast and developing wings, antennae, legs, and eyes. Tiny hairs will start to sprout up over its body. You can learn more about the parts of a bee here.

The queen takes the least amount of time to develop through the pupa stage. Within 8 days she’ll be ready to chew her way out of the queen cell and begin her life. Workers take 4 days longer to develop, while drones are the slowest to emerge, taking over 2 weeks.

Bee Caste                       Days   spent as a pup

Queen                             8 days

Worker                           12 days

Drone                             14½ days

Once the adult male leaves the cell, worker bees will clear out the cell, preparing it for the next egg.

Phase 4: Adult

Now that the honey bee has reached adulthood, it will immediately go about its duties as part of the colony. Unlike humans, bees don’t require nurturing in infancy. They are ready to go from the moment they leave the cell.

The queen

The queen bee has an average life expectancy of 1-2 years although she may live up to 7 years if she’s lucky. Her longevity is reliant on her ability to lay fertilized eggs. Once she starts to slow down, the queen will be replaced by a new one.

Workers

Worker bees have different life expectancies, depending on what season they are hatched. The summertime variety has huge amounts of work to get done and is required to work long hours. It usually won’t live more than 6 weeks before running its body into the ground.

Workers born in late fall or winter have a much simpler role. Rather than foraging, they spend the cold months huddled in a group within the hive. Their main job is to keep the queen warm and alive until spring. Winter worker bees may live up to 5 months.      

Drones

A drone’s life is much easier than a worker’s, with its main purpose being to mate with a queen. It isn’t required to do work like forage or nurse other bees. But an easy life doesn’t mean a drone can expect a longer existence.

There are two possibilities for a drone. It mates with a queen bee and dies immediately afterward as its appendage is ripped from its body. Drones can mate from 16 days of age, so this shows how short a drone’s life can be.

The second option is it doesn’t successfully mate and gets evicted from the hive as winter arrives. A drone may live for up to 5-7 weeks if it is unsuccessful at finding a queen to mate with.

How long does it take for a honey bee to develop from egg to adult?

• Queen:      16 days
• Worker:      21 days
• Drones:      24 days

What are the four stages of a bee’s life cycle?

A bee starts as an egg that is laid in an open cell, before developing into a larva. Next is the pupa stage, where the cell is capped, before transforming into an adult bee.

Summing up

The honey bee is a complex creature that develops from egg to fully-functioning adult within a few weeks. That’s an impressive feat.

The time it takes to develop, along with the bee’s life expectancy, will depend on whether it’s a drone, worker, or queen. Queens develop the quickest but can expect to live the longest so long as it performs for the hive. Drones that successfully mate can expect a life that may be as short as 16 days.