Enjoyable information about bees and honey discovered on the Iowa State Fair

Candles, lip balm, lotion, canine balm, and lemonade: These are a few of the issues that may be created from honey.

The Iowa Honey Producers Association owns the largest, longest sales space contained in the Agriculture Center on the Iowa State Fair. The nonprofit group is educating State Fair guests concerning the bee and honey business with a show of reside bees, honeycombs, wax figures, infused honey samples and honey lemonade.

“(The IHPA) has been active for over 100 years and been at the fair for over 60 years teaching people about honey and bees,” mentioned Jason Foley, previous president of the IHPA. “We love to see people interested in what we have to show.”

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Since 1912, the IHPA has labored to coordinate beekeepers throughout the state, inform the general public on bees, honey and their advantages, and suggest laws associated to bees and beekeeping.

What could be achieved with honey?

While the sticky substance is nice by itself, honey could be blended with artificial flavors to create quite a lot of tastes. The IHPA sales space holds over 30 flavors of honey that guests can pattern as they stroll by.

Other combos contain honey blended with frozen dried fruits, barrel-aged honey that is blended with whiskey, creamed honey that has a buttery and clean texture, infused honey from vegetation similar to peppers and garlic, or candies made out of honey.

As for consuming merchandise, honey lemonade could be created by mixing lemon juice and honey, changing synthetic sugars with pure sugars from the honey, and mead, which is an aged mixture of honey, water and yeast to make wine.

“There’s just a lot of different things that you can do with honey,” Foley mentioned, “much more than just consuming it.”

Mind your individual beeswax

Bees can convert honey into wax, which opens up many extra potentialities with the product.

“The bees actually have wax plants. It takes seven pounds of honey to make one pound of wax,” mentioned Connie Bronnenberg, chief of the queen program at IHPA.

The wax could be poured into molds of any form or measurement and transformed into candles by means of a cooling course of. It may contribute to the creation of a number of skincare merchandise similar to lotion, lip balm, soaps, and even canine balm for pets.

Collections became competitions

The reside bees on show are actively engaged on a honeycomb and feeding the queen bee. Tubes connect three instances collectively to let the bees to maneuver from one honeycomb to a different.

Each yr, the IHPA permits judges to rank their bee instances based mostly on totally different standards. The tougher they work collectively, the higher the combs can be. And the higher the combs, the higher the scores.

“Part of the competition is the woodworking skills of the beekeeper,” mentioned Jim Marshall, district one director at IHPA. “How well they can display the comb, how good their comb looks in their frames, and the general condition of the bees.”

For honeycombs, how properly they’re formed and the way stuffed they’re with honey will make or break the decide’s scores.

“The comb should have a good display of brood all the way from larva to cap stage, so that you can see different stages of brood,” Marshall mentioned. “It should have some honey along the edges and some pollen on display in the honey frame.”

Judges additionally rank their merchandise on show. For honey, every jar is judged based mostly off its taste, colour, moisture, quantity, readability, and freedom of impurities together with foam and granulation.

The IHPA has owned larger cubicles up to now, almost taking on one whole facet of the Agriculture Building’s second ground. Despite needing to shrink down, the sales space remains to be a well-liked and distinctive attraction to retain its area.

“If we don’t keep this space full, then we’re at risk of losing it,” Bronnenburg mentioned. “We’ve got so many entries, and if we keep the entries up, we’ll stay here for a long time.”

Chris Meglio is a reporter for the Register. Reach him at cmeglio@gannett.com or on X @chris_meglio.