A honeybee (Apis mellifera) sips nectar from an aster in a butterfly garden.
We’ve been busy as bees this week, and so have the…well…bees.
Its coming to the end of honey harvest season, and what a season it’s been, in total for our one hive we have harvested over 14kg of honey! Let me take you through the process, as a landscape designer and avid gardener I have been working with my property (that I have a sneaking suspicion used to have heavy pesticide use) to bring back the insects.
I’m sure we have all heard that without our intrepid pollinators we’d be stuck eating potatoes and not much else. Bees are at the top of the pollinator food chain, they do the heavy lifting for the crops you buy in your weekly shop. Now our property was a flower desert (except for those god awful grandma camellias), the landscaping was sparse with most of our almost 3000m2 land covered in a mix of weeds, grass and moss. Dandenong ranges rain is nothing to scoff at! So where was I, flowers yes, I have been undertaking a major redesign and overhaul of this property ensuring that our most valued allies have got as much food and varied sources as possible.
Surrounded by acacia (wattle) and eucalyptus bush they have a decent head start, but their flowering seasons are shortish and unreliable in the case of the eucalypts. So once the plan was created I fixed the soil and planted, salvia, cosmos, statice, agastache the list goes on, and boy were we rewarded. We have not one, not two but three harvests! Usually its just me in my hot pink bee suit (a fun Christmas present a few years ago) but this year it was all hands on deck.
Start the smoker, not as easy when you’ve left the woodchips our in the rain all winter. Don the super stylish suit, hive tool and bee brush pocketed and feel armed for combat. Stomp all the way to the top of the hill that our bees call home and struggle a bit to get the roof off. They use their glue to seal it shut from weather and other bugs. Everyone is looking healthy, no sign in the brood comb (baby nursery) of varroa yet, nasty bug that only came to Aus a few years ago. Lift out the now very heavy frames, brush the bees off as carefully as possibly and hand to my teenage daughter, she balances them on a super large bowl and I go back for another. One complete and fresh frames put in incase the nectar is still flowing we head for the house, after a quick bee check (arms out and spin-you don’t know fear until you take off your suit and realise you’ve brought half the hive into your house) its time for processing.
Now we do this a bit of an oldschool way, we cut the honey comb out of the frames completely, we don’t spin the honey out we crush and strain. We do this for a couple of reasons, one we don’t have a spinner thing and two the honey has a better flavour when its crushed out and strained through the wax. Unless you have bees of your own you will never have honey with this flavour, it makes the bees work harder building new wax and is not cost effective for honey producers. Then once its all cut out we pop it in a giant sieve (we use one that’s made for washing vegetables in the sink), crush it by hand and wait. Our dining table becomes a mass of sticky bowls and the smell is just divine. Once that first batch have fully strained the leftover sticky comb/wax goes into a big pot with some water to wait. Second batch through the strainer, then the third. Mind you I am constantly scooping out the strained honey and popping it into jars, any jar, hang on I though I had more jars. Search through the cupboards, why is there one outside the backdoor…oh right hubby hates ants, must have been one of his manic kitchen cleans. Dishwasher load, more honey jars. After about 4-5 days the honey is all finished straining. I put the last of it into jars this morning. 14kg, well that is a lot of honey.
We celebrate by having honey soy chicken thighs and sweet potato fritters with a whipped cottage cheese and hot honey. A bit fancy for a mid week dinner but I got inspired, sue me haha. Now I bet you thought that was it, honey harvest done move on with the next project but you forgot one important thing. The wax. I actually don’t love this part but the smell and the final product is so worth the effort, remember that giant pot on the stove with all the empty honey comb and water, well its now full, overfull actually and it needs to be melted. Melt one is easy, take it off the heat and wait for the wax to solidify on the top, take it out, pour out the now disgusting water, scrape off the crap sitting on the bottom of the wax and do it again, and again. Each time the water gets clearer and so does the wax, the house is filled with the smell of beeswax, is this what it was like in the old monasteries? Beautiful, one final melt and strain through well I use a sieve and a fresh chux, don’t come at me I’m fresh out of cheesecloth! The final wait for it to solidify and then it is stored until such a time as I want to make candles, or furniture polish (is that still a thing?) And that my friends is our bee harvest update, I hope your’e all enjoying this stunning Autumn weather and are ready for the big cold!