This is a guest post by Israelinurse

Rosh HaShana (Jewish New Year) is just around the corner and as ever we will be eating apples dipped in honey to symbolise our hopes for a sweet year to come. This seemed like a good time to take a closer look at the creatures without which we would have neither the apples nor the honey, so off I went to meet beekeeper Yaniv of the Reikin Farm on Moshav Natur.

Yaniv has been independent for five years, having spent some years before that learning the profession. He is in fact a third generation of beekeepers in Israel; his wife’s grandfather first began keeping bees as a hobby in 1919 in Petah Tikva where he was born, whilst working as a court secretary for the British Mandate and being active in the Hagana. The passion for bees passed down to his son and now to Yaniv, who continues the family tradition and has a photograph of Grandfather Azriel on the label of his jars of delicious honey.

Yaniv has some 600 hives which he moves around the Golan and Upper Galilee areas in the spring and summer when the apple, nectarine and pear orchards, as well as other crops such as pumpkin, need pollinating.  In the autumn and winter he takes his hives down to the warmer Jordan Valley and defines his honey as ‘wild flower’ honey due to the fact that during the dry summer season the nectar which the bees gather comes from the flowers of thistles, wild dill, rosemary and squill.

During the autumn Yaniv is busy preparing his hives for the winter by introducing new queens to the hives and creating new swarms. Each swarm comprises four to five combs and eight to ten combs make up a family which will only start producing honey a year after the swarm has been established. This is also the time when Yaniv takes care of the health of his hives by treating ailments and the ticks which can wipe out a hive before closing them up for the winter.

The native bee of Israel is the Syrian bee, which Yaniv describes as being ‘temperamental’ and gives little honey, so when commercial beekeeping first began in Israel during the 1950s bees were brought from Italy. Today’s bees are a hybrid of those Italian new immigrants interbred with bees from the Caucuses and are the result of the artificial insemination of queen bees with the aim of strengthening the hives. Yaniv buys ready inseminated queens to create new swarms and strengthen his existing ones.

Each of his hives yields between 30 and 60 kilograms of honey a year, depending on the weather conditions. In a year with good rainfall, evenly spread throughout the winter season, he can produce 17 to 18 tonnes of honey. Last year the rainfall was concentrated in a relatively short period of time which resulted in the wild flowers shortening their blooming season so he only managed to produce nine tonnes.  Yaniv also packs all the honey himself under the watchful eye of a supervisory body which has granted his produce the status of ‘quality honey’ and ensures that his product meets international standards.

It is always a pleasure to meet people who are passionate about what they do for a living and Yaniv’s obvious love of his profession makes his product very special. As he showed me how the bees beat their wings 2,000 times to cause the water to evaporate from the honey newly stored in the combs, I thought about the thousands of years of the ‘special relationship’ between man and this tiny, yet complex, creature which is essential for so much of our food production and how much we need people like Yaniv who truly respect and look after them. My apple dipped in honey is going to taste even more special this year.

Wishing all ‘Oy Va Goy’ readers a happy and sweet year to come.