Harvesting method of stingless bee honey (trigona sp)

This purpose of this research is to design a new device that is used for harvesting honey. The device will replace the traditional method in harvesting the honey of stingless bee. This research also purposed to help bee farmers to save energy and time for harvesting other than increasing the efficiency of tools used for collecting honey. The device was tested upon Trigona thoracica and Trigona itama hives and being compared with the traditional methods using syringe. The parameters used for this research are the harvesting time and the viscosity of honey. The comparison between the amount of honey between Trigona thoracica and Trigona itama was also investigated in this study. From the results obtained, the harvesting method using this portable pump (350.4 sec/hive) was lower compared to using syringe (629 sec/hive). The most heavy weight gain was for 50 ml of pure honey with weight 63.73 g. The highest viscosity obtained by the 50 ml of pure honey and the time taken for highest viscosity is 442 seconds/50ml. From these results, what can be concluded for this prototype device is that the device could save energy and time others than increasing the harvesting efficiency and production of stingless bee honey.