Sustainability with Bee4IT

Green IT

As part of our focus on sustainability, IT-HAUS GmbH cooperates with its employee René Etteldorf, who has been Senior Supply Chain Manager at the company since 2007.

René has been running his own beekeeping business at his home in Primstal since 2015 and has kept up to 16 colonies there at times. He currently has four colonies, and plans to have seven colonies again in 2023.

He keeps some of the colonies in his own garden and some in an apiary in the forest. René beekeeps in a magazine with Carnica bees on German standard frames.

If the year goes well, he can harvest honey twice a year, once in spring and once in summer. Most of the honey from René's bees comes from cherry blossoms and a variety of other fruits.

As a world without bees is unthinkable for biodiversity, their protection is particularly important for our survival. Sustainable agriculture cannot function without bee pollination, so we owe a large part of our plant-based food to them.

We would like to support this and have therefore included René's honey as a "sustainable advertising medium". We give away our honey Bee4IT at events or other occasions where we want to do something good for others.

Information about honey

From the flower to the glass

Honey is an unadulterated natural product of our industrious bees - which obtain it primarily from two sources: flower nectar and honeydew (the sugary excretions of insects). Around 2 million blossoms have to be flown to for 500 g of blossom honey. That's around 40,000 trips from the bee colony to the flowers and back, which is equivalent to flying 3 times around the world. Nectar and honeydew are processed by the bees during collection and enriched with their own body secretions. This means that a bee can carry up to 60mg in its pinhead-sized honey bladder. During the return flight, endogenous substances are added to the collected material and the transformation into honey begins.

In the hive, it is then up to the hive bee to carefully process the collected honey into honey. It transports it from one honeycomb cell to another and extracts water from the honey through evaporation. Additional water evaporates through nightly fanning of the bee colony. In this way, the honey matures slowly, while the hive bee also provides it with valuable enzymes, to which it owes its antibacterial effect in part. Later, the bee seals the cells with a thin layer of wax, thus protecting the finished honey - like a safe - from foreign influences.

If the honey cells of a comb are "capped" with wax, the beekeeper knows that the honey is ripe.

Source: German Beekeepers' Association