It is a fresh from the wall of a house honeycomb.
Do you remember our friend the Bee Wrangler and the adventure we had here at the house? Well, she has those kinds of adventures all the time. And one day this summer she had a big job not too far from our house. We kept her kids all day and she brought us the honeycombs from the job.
She instructed us to freeze the whole mess until it was solid. This keeps some potential worm from growing. We froze it for several days. Just to be sure. Really sure.
When you are sure it is thoroughly frozen, thaw it out. Then all you do is squeeze and let it drip. Our mess looked like this.
And let me tell you, it was a mess. A sticky, sticky, sticky mess.
But it yielded us 2 full quarts of deliciously mild, golden honey. We will be using it for awhile. And we did it ourselves which was really cool.
I also learned an interesting bee fact from her. Did you know that it is not all the bees that are Africanized. It's only the queen. If you have an Africanized queen, remove her from the hive and you can requeen them with a nice queen and they will be nice bees. Who knew? An evil queen. Why hasn't Disney been all over this?
4 comments:
Wow! Your own honey and you don't even have to mess with the bees.
That first shot looks like something out of a horror movie. Then we find out, from a homeowner's perspective, it IS something out of a horror movie!
I'll bet, speaking from artistic experience, you could heat the honeycome in a cheesecloth till the wax melts and separate the remaining honey from the wax. Beeswax melts at about 145 degrees so, though you wouldn't want to keep the honey separated that way with the squeezed honey (It will crystalize sooner.) you would have more honey AND relatively clear beeswax to play with.
An aside to readers- Don't feed raw honey to babies younger than two. It is not sterile and can be a challenge to young immune systems.
Lee
I thought the rule was not to give a baby honey until he is one.
I thought it was until 1, too, Michelle. I trust your knowledge of all things baby, so let's go with one. : )
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