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Tom's Honey Party
Nov. 27th, 2005 10:08 amTag yesterday as a "learn something new" day, and it was a sweet something I learned -- the art of honey extraction.
My friend Tom is a hobbyist beekeeper, and yesterday he hosted a honey extraction party. By his own admission, the party was a shameless Tom Sawyer maneuver; he was offering us the coveted opportunity to do his work for him! None of us minded a bit. Honey processing is cooler than you'd think. The birthday girl and I spent all afternoon there.
Tom's bees had made their honey for the season, and he had harvested the heavy, honey-laden combs, waiting in a wooden rack in his bathtub.
First the combs are transferred to a rack/pan/thing, where the cells are broken open with a comb-like scraping tool, shaped something like a metal 'fro pick. Then, in pairs, they're placed in a hand-cranked centrifuge. You need to crank pretty fiercely to spin it fast enough to draw out the honey (hence the need for many sets of cranking arms). The honey drips down into a reservoir, and is eventually emptied into a bucket. Later, Tom will filter out all the wax chips (and probably a few bee parts) and bottle up the raw honey for sharing with friends and family. I hope he has a lot of people on his list – we extracted 22 gallons of honey!
There were lots of honey-based treats to keep our energy up. Honey ice cream, baklava, bread & honey, honey wine, and honey liqueur. Also a wonderfully savory lasagne, to balance out the sweet. I'd been a bit sleepy when I got there, but the honey treats gave me a through-the-roof sugar high that lasted the whole afternoon.
He said that each worker bee makes about 1/8th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. If I'm doing the math correctly for 22 gallons (and I might not be), we processed the work of 135,116 bees. And how can you be anything but happy when you have baklava for breakfast? :-)
My friend Tom is a hobbyist beekeeper, and yesterday he hosted a honey extraction party. By his own admission, the party was a shameless Tom Sawyer maneuver; he was offering us the coveted opportunity to do his work for him! None of us minded a bit. Honey processing is cooler than you'd think. The birthday girl and I spent all afternoon there.
Tom's bees had made their honey for the season, and he had harvested the heavy, honey-laden combs, waiting in a wooden rack in his bathtub.
First the combs are transferred to a rack/pan/thing, where the cells are broken open with a comb-like scraping tool, shaped something like a metal 'fro pick. Then, in pairs, they're placed in a hand-cranked centrifuge. You need to crank pretty fiercely to spin it fast enough to draw out the honey (hence the need for many sets of cranking arms). The honey drips down into a reservoir, and is eventually emptied into a bucket. Later, Tom will filter out all the wax chips (and probably a few bee parts) and bottle up the raw honey for sharing with friends and family. I hope he has a lot of people on his list – we extracted 22 gallons of honey!
There were lots of honey-based treats to keep our energy up. Honey ice cream, baklava, bread & honey, honey wine, and honey liqueur. Also a wonderfully savory lasagne, to balance out the sweet. I'd been a bit sleepy when I got there, but the honey treats gave me a through-the-roof sugar high that lasted the whole afternoon.
He said that each worker bee makes about 1/8th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. If I'm doing the math correctly for 22 gallons (and I might not be), we processed the work of 135,116 bees. And how can you be anything but happy when you have baklava for breakfast? :-)