Honey

First honey harvest off the bees. My god it’s a messy process. But tasty.

Anna was super-pleased with this frame, for obvious reasons. Absolutely perfect. They weren’t all like that, but there were a lot of them.

You have to uncap the cells first, so the honey can theoretically run out in the extractor.

It worked superbly on a frame this perfect.

So amazing. Unfortunately the lumpy, dark, pollen-hard ones were a little more challenging and a little less attractive.

Into the extractor, which is basically a big salad spinner, letting centripetal force get the honey out of the cells.

Sieve the results and we get about 4 pints of beautiful, pure, cold-extracted honey.

Nicola and Rob were there and very helpful, so I jarred up a bit for them to take home.

We were really pleased with the cold-processed stuff. The rest was a bit full of pollen, waxy bits, and whatever else the dark, grainy, hard stuff is in honeycomb, I don’t really know. I’ve boiled it up to get the wax off it, and the honey that results at the bottom is a bit darker, perfectly edible, but I assume there’s a reason you’re not supposed to heat it, so it’s sort of “seconds”. I’m sure as hell still going to use it though, because there’s more of that than there was of the virgin stuff and to be honest, I sort of prefer the taste of the head-processed. We’re calling it honey molasses. Call in if you want to taste test.