First things first – good eatin’ for dinner! After a day of productive work, there’s hardly anything more enjoyable to me than cooking up a nice for us to enjoy in the comfort of our own space and that applies to the old house as well as the new one. I love to cook and I have enjoyed learning to cook more with honey in the recipe. We love wings, especially during football season (who doesn’t, lol) and we’ve enjoyed darker honey varieties such as Huajilla, local Wildflower and Blueberry in the sauce in the past. Last week I used Orange Blossom in the Honey Curry Chicken and we liked it. This evening I used the very light Montana Clover in the wings recipe and we loved it. Very nice and light flavor – so yummy we stuck with it on our fruit salad. I must say, with so many varieties from which to choose, sometimes we find ourselves rediscovering each honey and it’s fun.
That’s another Heitkam queen that Mark just pulled from the queen bank. He continues to work through the bee yards at this point of the season. He’s applying the Mite Away – three of the biggest bee yards have been done and more to go. In the process, if there is a super big hive, he divides and installs a new queen in the new hive. It’s a time consuming chore but it must be done if we are to help the bees with the mites. Mark has a method and system now so he says that helps him to know what to do each day and as the weeks pass. Tours and visits are on hold since he’s out in the field pretty much all day and I’m still full time at the steel mill. One of these days, we’re going to have a full time person manning the office and retail space and I hope that person will be moi.
And finally, a few words about another Honey House activity I’ve mentioned before – dealing with the buckets of wax cappings from our extraction earlier in the summer. This is an example of a tub of cappings that Mark and Stan poured out of buckets so that the honey can drain out of the wax. They let a batch sit in the tub for two to three days and then Mark puts the wax back into a bucket for later rendering. The honey gets stored until we are ready to bottle it. You might look at that tub and think, “How much honey could possibly be there??” Well…see last picture.
Not looking my finest but that’s okay. It was another hot and humid day after work when I visited the Honey House to see how Mark was doing. Check out that stack of buckets. That represents about eight buckets of wax cappings that have been drained. Amazing. So it’s about one bucket of honey for two buckets of wax. Not bad! He still has a bit more to finish so we’ll get a little more delicious honey in the bank for winter – yay! And each bucket is 60 pounds of honey. Or if you are a count-by-the-bottle kind of person, that’s 60 squeeze bottles or 60 glass 1-pounders or 120 cute little 8oz bottles. All that to say we waste nothing. If the bees don’t eat or use it, we will. 🙂
Gretchen Bee Ranch 