That's what I got to be a few weeks ago, on a Saturday morning after a big storm. I was with members of the
Franciscan Monastery Garden Guild, extracting honey from the 14 hives they keep on the Monastery grounds. I met the head beekeeper a week or so ago, and I helped him move some frames of bees from one hive to another. It was the first time I've had on The Veil and Worked The Bees since I gave away my hive in May 2011. Extracting the honey great fun. We had no electricity but that didn't interfere with the project, every step of which requires no electricity. The tasks ranged from carrying (into an upstairs work room) the big heavy boxes of honey-filled frames, to carefully scraping off the top layer of wax on each frame, to hand-spinning the frames in those metal contraptions, to pouring the honey into a bucket with a screen on it, to pouring that filtered honey into bottles, to labeling the bottles. It was great fun.
The honey is sold in the gift store for the Monastery. And each volunteer got a bottle of honey and here's mine! Tasty. It would be nice to make honey my only sweet, replacing store-bought cookies and chocolate and ice cream and pies and blahblahblah, but that's oh-so unlikely. (And it's too bad I put my wet thumb over the label.)
3 comments:
That sounds like a fun adventure!
My brother and sister-in-law were driving home from a friend's house when the storm hit--they had never seen anything like it.
What an awesome thing to do! It's hard to believe that anything doesn't require electricity these days. I wish I liked honey, but I much prefer sugar. :)
We're planning the 2012 Dinwiddie St. harvest for this weekend. Wish us luck!
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