The grass on the outer mountains had begun to turn yellow, but the vegetables deeper in the mountains were still green. All sorts of flowers were blooming, and the bees were hard at work.
As Li Long searched for mushrooms, he thought about an educational article he had seen on a short-video platform in his previous life.
Honey was made when bees ate pollen, turned it into honey in their stomachs, then spat it back out.
Because it still contained water after being spat out, the bees had to keep beating their wings to fan the moisture out of the honey.
Didn't that sound disgusting?
It was actually much like eating bird's nest.
Also, if beekeepers placed their hives somewhere with an extremely abundant nectar supply, the bees would have no time to remove the moisture from the honey they made from the pollen they collected. That honey became raw honey.
With enough nectar-producing plants, the honey the bees collected would quickly fill the combs before they had time to cap them. Honey harvested like that fermented easily and usually took a year or two to become ripe honey.
In his previous life, after Li Long handed his land over to the Cooperative, the team had organized a trip to Ili for those of them approaching old age. The honey they bought in Zhaosu during the rapeseed bloom had been like that.
Uncapped honey was collectively known as raw honey.
There was local honey too, actually, but locals never bought honey from the team. Almost all the local farmland had been planted with cotton in those years. To get high yields, they sprayed pesticides from the moment the leaves emerged-cotton had suffered from a great many pests and diseases back then.
Red spider mites, cotton bollworms, cotton aphids, pink bollworms,