METHOD DEVELOPMENT FOR COMB HONEY PRODUCTION

Abstract

Abstarct Bangladesh. An experiment was conducted in a litchi orchard at Iswardi of Pabna district in the year 2021 in Bangladesh to develop feasible comb honey production at colony level. Twenty number of strong bee colonies were used to develop comb honey inside a Super chamber on each strong bee colony. Litchi orchard was used as a source of nectar producing plants. Four methods were used to harvest comb honey i.e. comb cassette method, bottle with wax foundation method, bottle without wax foundation method and only frame in super as untreated control. Honey collection from the super chamber of bee hive was the highest (1.702 kg/frame) in only frame in super (control) in comparison to all other treatments viz. comb cassette method, bottle with wax foundation method and bottle without wax foundation method in terms of weight per unit in super chamber. But in terms of area per super chamber of bee hive the highest (53.546 kg/super) yield of honey was obtained from the comb cassette method utilized bee hives which is followed by control (30.638kg/super), bottle without wax foundation (11.433 kg/super) and bottle with wax foundation (6.405kg/super), respectively. It was observed that in comb cassette method honey yield increases by 74.77% in comparison to untreated control method. It was also revealed that profitability can be increased by double fold (2.03) by adopting the comb cassette method in litchi blooming period from a honey bee colony. Key words: comb cassette, honey yield, profitability