The Honey Harvest

Last weekend the three of us were beckoned down to the country to assist our Dad with the first honey harvest of the year. He has been keeping bees for a while now, but this is the first year with a plentiful honey crop, so the troops were called in to help. I'm not sure any of us were quite prepared for the stickiness that ensued!

The first stage is to remove all the honeycomb from the hives. Each of these frames are filled with honey which need to be extracted (and we had 8 crates to get through!).

Some of the comb ends up 'capped', which means it has been completely filled with honey.

After us fawning over how smart the little bees are to make such a beautiful pattern, we were given the task of "de-capping" the comb, which soon became a bit of a competition to see who could do it the fastest!

Once the panels have been de-capped, they are placed into this terrifying looking contraption, and spun to extract all the honey. We learnt the hard way that if you forget to put the lid on, the entire room (and us) gets covered in a thin but very sticky layer of honey- oops!

It's overwhelming how much honey is produced, and soon enough it's time to tap it into huge buckets.

Some of us (Fiona) had to restrain ourselves from acting like Winnie the Pooh and sticking our whole hands in it in order to eat it!

Once all the honey has been collected (all 116lbs of it!) it gets filtered, and finally jarred.

Now the only challenge is, what to do with so much honey?!

Lots of love,

Fiona, Samara and Anna

xxx