Beekeeper’s Delight -Stolen Gold – Honey

The Beekeeper’s Delight…Springtime Flowing Liquid Amber!

Today I harvested a top box from 2 of my neighborhood hives… & they each were about 70% full of honey.   It is a dark amber capped honey from …when?  Last fall?

The 4 hives are all healthy & strong – lots of foragers going in with an orange pollen.  I am glad for that, as many other hives have been lost this year…not sure of the percentage, but each loss is a blow to the health of honeybees & the hopes for our pollinated future.

Pictures of the rogue comb from one box that was left with a large open area (4 frames missing) in the center – see how they started to make comb in the other direction – nicely spaced & very orderly in some places.

On another frame, the comb got completely out of hand – looks like comb/cells on top of other cells, till it hung down dangerously & filled the available space…a surrealist sculpture – created in community!  We keepers have a job to do – to help the hive by keeping “bee space” for them so that they are not obliged to fill the spaces with rogue comb which must be hard to navigate on an hourly basis.  It takes a few minutes & focused intent in our buzzy lives… you could say -  Bee conscious!

My latest tidy trick…I used the “Bee Quick” natural oils with a fume board to move those girls down the box so that when I took the box off, it was almost entirely empty & could be quickly & easily de-framed into a plastic bin with lid.  I laid the fume board on the top of the open tub while I worked the frames & was pleased that no bees found the opening.  No more hive-side stress of brushing off the bees, handling & scraping frames into a bucket  while angry bees buzz around…of course, I now need to open the hive again tomorrow to replace those dripping frames & their super.  It is SO worth it!

I am cleaning out older honey & messy old comb to make room for the fresh seasonal crop – it is better for them & a bonus for those of us who value this golden treasure

After the hot work of harvesting, I got the chance to present a little home schooling to the “Blue House Gang” as I scraped the honey from the foundation in the safety of my kitchen.   We all admired the shape of the wax cells, ate some chewy comb honey, put a couple of bees safely outdoors, & most of all – watched the rich golden sticky stuff fall gracefully & deliciously from my spatula into the strainer – it was pure magic to see for the first time!

And now?

Honey is still slowly dripping fro the top strainer inside my big pot, so – before bed I will pour it into jars & get to watch the amber golden flow one more time!

Bees Here Now,

Annie

PS Saint Pat’s Day – and yes, I am wearing green…from top to bottom!

Honey – divine nectar , edible bee love and sacred food

I fell in love with the taste of honey as a young girl, and especially loved creamed honey on toast – or comb honey eaten right off of the spoon. Chewing the beeswax for an hour longer was a bonus from this special treat. Taking a moment to savor the vision of golden syrup as it dripped from the hexagonal cells was another aspect of my wonderful memories of comb honey.

And…

I still go off of my “let’s eat carefully of this precious nectar diet” when there is a chance to eat biscuits dripping with golden nectar!

The wonderful & best-selling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, “The Secret Life of Bees” unfolds in a sentimental, honey-glazed land that vaguely resembles South Carolina in 1964. The movie is almost as good as the book – for describing the inner life of its complex characters…I cried all the way through!

There is a scene in the movie – “The Secret Life of Bees” – when Lily smashes several jars of honey in her anger at her lack of mother-love. This abundance of wasted honey really brings home how powerful that loss must have been – for her to destroy the life work of her beloved bees. (One worker bee actually makes

only 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime.)

But – that is not the point of this brief post…I merely wanted to remind my readers that honey is precious – so precious that it takes a honey bee (Apis mellifera) 154 trips, carrying tiny amounts of nectar from the flower to the hive, just to make one teaspoon of honey. The days of cooking with an entire cup of honey are long gone in my life…as a natural food devotee in the 1970’s I ate more than my share of this divine nectar. So I hope that we all begin to offer greater respect for the trials of the honey bee in these times of CCD – let’s eat honey wisely, offer our blessings to the bee, and begin to keep hives locally! That will develop better genetic strains of bee that may weather this time of collapse, which I believe mirrors the overall environmental stress of our current Planet -wide crisis.

Honey has been used as a medicine and a sacred food since before the ancient Egyptians began to keep hives.

So – hey – Let’s get back to a sense of the sacred with all of our foods, and especially those which are truly precious and rare, hard to get and involve the sacrifices of our fellow species.

Blessed Bee.