While we wait for Ian to update his blogg from this Birthday, I thught I’d tell you about getting the honey in this year. Yes its been a sticky-sweet weekend. The first step is geting the honey away from the bees. You see they are against it and get quite aggressive, making my job harder. Now I use a primative mechanism for getting the bees off the comb – a paint brush. This winds them up even more. Now my gloves, brush and everything is slippery with leaking honey, the bees are attacking me and the honey boxes weigh about 30 kg each. Its hard work. Once the frames are in the garage, I have to round up any stray bees (think vaccum cleaner) and get all the gear ready for the extraction phase. This is the fun part and we get absolutely covered in stay honey. Step one is to use an special hot knife to uncap the frames. We then load them in a centrifcal extractor (hand cranked), that spins the honey out of the comb. All that is left is the draining, straining and bottling. I suspect we got about 50kgs of honey this year. Enough for 20,000 slices of toast.
This year’s honey is darker, reflecting more manuka and local flora and less clover. The flavour is mild yet distinct and is a good eating honey.
yum, toast and honey…bet that makes the upcoming cold wet winter a little cheerier…especially when its your honey! Good job.
It always sounds like you’ve got a hundred acres or so with all the neat stuff you squeeze off that property. But I know you don’t have that much space.