Remember that honey is easiest to harvest when it still holds the warmth of summer and can flow easily.

I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. About the Book Author Howland Blackiston has more than 20 years' experience keeping bees. For beekeepers, when to harvest honey is not science fiction, there are a couple of indicators to know when to collect honey from the beehive. Hunters climb up to 300 feet at the cliffs to harvest honey. If you wait too long to remove your supers, the weather turns too cold to harvest your honey. Some of the earliest evidence of gathering honey from wild colonies is from rock painting, dating back 10,000 years and found in a cave in Valencia, Spain. You're out hiking and you come across a wild honey bee hive. Generally speaking, beekeepers harvest their honey at the conclusion of a substantial nectar flow and when the beehive is filled with cure

If you've been keeping and tending to a hive of bees, you'll be in for a treat once it comes time to harvest and sample the honey your hive has produced. Newey spent weeks trying to find responsible honey hunters that wouldn’t exploit the bees and their habitat for his money, and will not reveal the location of the cliffs they harvest. The Gurungs must climb up treacherous cliffs and face the fury of swarming bees. Selling your own honey is incredibly rewarding and helps to pay off the expenditures of beekeeping.

The amount of honey made by the bees is dependent on the type of bees you keep, the nectar flow in your area, weather, environmental factors and the age of your hives.

And we, as beekeepers, are interested in how to harvest honey in a sustainable way.

However, this is not to say the product is of low value: often it will ferment quickly but has high local value as a cultural food, tonic, aphrodisiac or medicine.

Their hunt takes place twice a year, in spring and autumn, and it begins at the break of morning. However, a honey harvest is not always guaranteed just from keeping bees. Raw, unpasteurized honey from local beekeepers has many health benefits and eating a bit a day can also help control seasonal allergies.

The sizes of these nests can become extremely large and can get up to 5ft in diameter and contain about 60 kg of honey in them, which helps add to the difficulty of harvesting the honey from them.

A hunter seen harvesting honey from the cliffs, hanging on the rope ladder.

Check out the photo gallery and captions below for the step-by-step honey harvesting process. If there is a lit campfire; or fire directly underneath the hive (campfire within five blocks underneath, without obstruction), harvesting the hive does not aggravate the bees inside. Hunting for this honey is a dangerous activity and most of the cliffs are named and remembered by the names of honey hunters who died during honey harvesting. The cliff bees normally build gigantic nests that are constructed on overhanging rocks of the Southwestern facing cliffs.