The difference between Chinese honey and Italian honey

Honey is a food that we are very familiar with in our lives. Honey is also a very good tonic. With the improvement of living standards, people pay more and more attention to health and wellness. Therefore, many people consume some honey in their daily lives, and have higher and higher requirements for the quality of honey. At present, there are many kinds of honey that can be seen on the market. Among them, the most popular honeys are Chinese honey and Italian honey.

Question 1

The Chinese bee is a native species. It is small, with a black head and thorax, a yellow-black abdomen, and yellow-brown hair all over its body. It is agile, adaptable, and resistant to low and high temperatures. It can survive the severe winter of -30℃ to -40℃ in natural tree holes, and can fly out of the nest to collect at a temperature of 10℃. It can also collect, build combs, and reproduce as usual at a temperature of 40℃. The honey production is lower than that of Italian bees, but the quality is good.

Question 2

Italian bees are large, with yellow backs, and produce a lot of honey, royal jelly and pollen. They were introduced from the West as a fine breed and have now become a major bee species raised in China. Italian bees cannot resist a Chinese pest, the bee mite, and must have human help to prevent the mite in order to reproduce normally. Italian bees cannot survive on their own in the wild in China and will naturally disappear after a period of time.

Question 3

The honey produced by the Chinese bee is what we usually call wild honey. It has a very high concentration and is a mixed honey that contains all the ingredients such as pollen, propolis, and beeswax. Because the Chinese bee is good at collecting scattered nectar sources, unlike the Italian bee which only collects nectar from large flower sources and ignores roadside wild flowers, local honey is the real multi-flower honey. It is said that an experienced honey taster can taste the slight bitterness, sourness and astringency hidden in a small sip of wild honey... After the wild honey is crystallized, the particles are very fine, as fine as fat and as smooth as cream.

Question 4

Chinese bees can only collect honey once or twice a year (twice for strong colonies and once for small colonies) because collecting honey is not convenient. All the honeycombs in the bucket have to be cut out, and the eggs and pupae laid by the queen bee will also be damaged. After collecting the honey, they can only build a new nest. The huge project of nesting requires the worker bees to expend more energy to secrete wax, which affects the collection and making of honey.

Although the Chinese bee is relatively hardworking and has strong resistance to mites, it likes to swarm and is not easy to maintain a strong colony. This leads to poor collecting ability of the colony and its ability to utilize large amounts of nectar sources is not as good as other bee species that can maintain strong colonies. Chinese bees like new combs and often bite off old combs to build new ones for reproduction. When nectar sources are scarce, they are prone to steal honey from other bee colonies. When there is a severe shortage of honey or the bee colony is unable to resist enemies, it will abandon the nest and flee. The queen bee of the Chinese honey bee lays fewer eggs per day than that of the Western honey bee, and the worker bees have a low feeding capacity, resulting in very slow reproduction of the Chinese honey bee.