A Taste of Honey

Now, there's taste in Birthday presents,
a straw skep.  

With Liz having been away on the actual date of my Birthday, she proposed that I should have a second "Official" birthday on the next available day so that I could catch up on the missing presents and coffee in bed and the special meal. We decided on Saturday (25th) and I had a lovely day being spoiled. The presents had a decidedly bee-keeping flavour and included the lovely straw 'skep' in the pic. Every home should have one, don't you agree? These were the actual hives back in the days before modern wooden hives were designed but had the disadvantage that you could not remove the honey on portable frames like we can now, so the colony had to be destroyed at harvest time to get the honey out.

Nowadays, we do not willingly destroy our bee colonies,and the skeps are used as swarm-catching baskets; they are much better than cardboard boxes or other containers because the bees can cling to the inside and hang on in there while you move them about. I also think they are beautiful artifacts so I have wanted one since we had bees, even though I am not at all sure I will ever get the chance to use it in anger.

Beef Wellington. Happy Birthday to me!

The meal was a treat, which we served on our best table linen ( a gift from Montenegro via 'Steak Lady'; thanks SL). Liz did a starter of langoustines and the main course was a Beef Wellington of rare scrumptiousness; the 'duxelle' mix round the meat was mushroom, onions and bacon. Dessert was a splendid blackberry Pavlova. For most of my life I have not been a fan of meringue because, as far as I knew, merignue was always impossibly sweet and like spooning crunchy sugar into your mouth. I do not have that kind of a 'sweet tooth'. If we were served lemon meringue pie I would try to sneak the meringue layer across to Liz.

Blackberry Pavlova

I am now converted. Meringue from Liz here is made with our real eggs as well as way less sugar, and is slightly soft and yielding rather than brittle. The fruit, too, is always done nice and naturally, with hardly any sugar added. In this case these were blackberries picked by us from John Deere Bob's field hedgerows and the mild un-enhanced flavour was beautifully evocative of the summer sun on picking day and the taste of the blackberries you always sneak as you walk round with the bucket, picking them. One for the bucket, one for me? No, not quite. We picked 5 kg each that day - we'd have been sick of them.

Fillet steak.

We lubricated the starter and dessert with chilled rosé and had a more meaty Rioja for the main course - a lovely 'Gran Reserva' grade Batturica (Tarragona) 2007 bottle from the amazingly good vintner, Lidl's supermarket (!) yours for just €7.99. The steak, too had been a good find - from our local favourite butcher (who is also our lamb slaughterman/butcher), Ignatius G Victualler. He had cut it out especially for us and kept it for us. Very reasonable in price, too.

Liz slices the cappings off a frame of
honey comb. 

Before I give the 'rescue package' bee hive back to our benefactor in Longford, I have to clean it and re-populate it with new frames and foundation, so we needed to 'dispose' of the used frames and sort out what to keep. You will know from earlier posts that some of these frames were full of honey, so we decided to have a go at extracting this. Bee keepers normally do this during mid/late summer after each 'honey flow' (i.e. at the end of the oilseed rape flowering season, or after the clover, or fruit blossom or heather), and do it with a gentle 'centrifuge' machine. The frames fit into the rotor of the machine and you spin the honey off them after slicing off the crinkly white wax cappings.

The mess of honey and wax sits in the muslin. The potential
for creating sticky mess is awesome. 

We have no such machine so we had to try letting the honey run out down through a muslin sheet, helped by gentle warmth from a double-boiler arrangement sitting on our range. Some of the honey comb was liquid enough (what they call "run honey"), presumably from blackberry blossom or other flowers. Some though was hard crystallized (granulated) so was probably ivy honey and was only going to drip through if it was warmed up. You have to do this very gently (roughly blood heat and a bit). Do not go anywhere near 60ºC or the wax will also start to melt and the honey will lose a lot of its flavour. Much of honey flavour is from bases, salts, amino acids, proteins and volatiles in it, as well as pollen so the more you mess it about, the more the quality goes down. You must also not use steam or damp-heat as honey is hygroscopic and takes up water easily from the surroundings. If it can stay at only 17% moisture it will keep for ever, but if the moisture content rises to 20% it can start to ferment, trying to turn itself into mead and developing bad 'off flavours'.

Double boiler set up on the range. 

Anyway, to cut a long story short this all worked and when we were satisfied that it would bimble gently through the night at not much more than blood heat, we left it to dribble and by morning we had a nice load of honey in the pan under the collander  which we were able to decant into a couple of jars in the morning. The 'dip a finger in' test told us that it was a bit special and certainly tasted a whole lot better than the commercial honey on our kitchen shelf. Liz promptly cooked up some toast and we had toast and honey for breakfast. We don't generally eat a lot of honey here (maybe 3 jars a year?) but we may do now that we have some proper stuff. Anne and Simon, who turned up later in the day also tried it and were impressed.

Generally speaking we are not about a huge production of honey. We like the bees for the 'wildlife gardening' reasons and to help with pollination locally. We never anticipated extracting much crop, preferring to leave the bees with it to help them through the winter. That is why, after all, the bees make and store honey - their survival through winter is at stake. We were going to ensure that the bees had enough (30 to 40 lbs per hive) and only steal a frame or two if these were excess to that. Only our hive failure led us to this happy coincidence and this lovely stash. Every cloud, we suppose, has a silver lining.

There are a few bubbles in it but our first honey is a lovely
pale colour and truly delicious. 

With all the honey extracted from the honey/wax mess, we now have the option of trying to recover the beeswax which Liz fancies turning into furniture polish or 'lotions and potions'. After however many seasons in the hive being trampled over by thousands of dirty, outdoor, bee feet, the wax can come off the 'extractor' dark brown or almost black but now we are not so worried about heat, so the wax is melted in the company of hot water so that it washes as well as going liquid and then you leave the whole to settle and cool. In theory you get a disc of clean. re-solidified wax 'floating' on your cooled down water, which you can then use in the alchemy to follow. I will let you know how this bit goes when we have processed a few more frames. Honey comb is so fine and delicately built that you do not get much wax out for each pound of honey; typically 1/8 as much.

We are having fun and learning all the time. The jars you see in these pics are from our first frame of honey. Since then we have started a bigger batch using 2 more frames. I don't think there is any chance of us going into commercial production but it will be nice to give a few jars away to friends. I was always amused by thoughts of what we would call the brand - honey is famously good to buy locally because there is a firm belief that eating local honey helps guard against allergies to local pollen, hay fever and so on. I wondered if we'd get away with using "Bees@Feigh", Feigh being the local 'townland'. However, the rhyme with 'bee' only works if you are an ignorant Brit, like me, and think it is pronounced 'fee'. It is not. It is another one of those 'Anglicised' Irish words (for deer), translittorated by the British military and map makers when they were 'in charge'. It is actually pronounced  'Fi' like the word 'fit' without the 't'; it is a very difficult word for Brits to say as we expect either a long vowel or a consonant. Bees@Feigh would just confuse everyone and might even put off the locals who you'd be hoping were your customers.

Rhubarb pie with a polenta crust.

The other mildly amusing aspect of this job is the HUGE potential for making a sticky mess. The honey can drip and then get on everything and the wax will happily re-solidify out of your washing up water as soon as it leaves the kitchen and cools down in the waste pipes en route to the sewer. We end up being oh so careful with the honey and keeping a pan JUST for the wax which will never get used for anything else. Well, we do if we want to see another Birthday, anyway!

"Book Learning"

Book Learning. Grand as far as it goes. We are madly trying to absorb as much information as we can on the 2014 projects - bees and pigs - and have read our little socks off on books, magazines, websites and leaflets. We have talked to as many people as we could persuade to give us advice and we have, as you know, joined a 'club' and been to one bee-based meeting. We probably 'know' way more than it is healthy to know for 2 people neither of whom has ever opened a beehive and lifted out a bee frame to examine the contents, or been closer to bees than idly spotting them on the garden flowers ("Oooh! I think THAT one is a honey bee!") or had anything to do with pigs other than helping to run 2 porkers down the ramp from trailer to slaughterhouse (about 5 seconds!).

You can't beat a turf fire for visual effect.

No. We are now hungry for hands-on, practical experience and 'monkey-do' learning. We want the bee training sessions to start, and especially the apiary based practical ones. I want to try myself out in the middle of a wary, loud-humming, cloud of potential stinging insects to know that I can be as cool, calm, relaxed, gentle and slow moving as I am with rabbits, sheep, geese and chickens. I want to know that I can be sufficiently careful that I do not risk 'rolling' bees between the close spaced bee frames (which annoys them) or squashing any between hive sections when reassembling the boxes. I want to know that I can move among pigs and bond with them, come to understand them without being nervous of them - they are big, strong and heavy, potentially dangerous animals when full grown, which need treating with respect. I expect I will be OK on both counts; I generally am. We are currently looking out for a pig rearing/keeping course aimed at small holders. Tipperary in April looks favourite so far.

Meanwhile, one of our favourite annual celebrations came around, Burns Night, our chance to eat haggis with a clear conscience and, this time, to have some guests to supper, Carolyn and Charlotte of the mini-horses, plus K-Dub and little Henry (2 in February). Being lamb-rearers, of course, this is not some kind of commercial, mass produced haggis boiled in a plastic (or gut if you're lucky) sleeve. It is the home made version constructed by Liz from our own lamb products; this year some breast meat, heart, liver and 'lights', plus, of course, oatmeal, onion and spices. 'Lights' for the uninitiated, is lung tissue; we managed to persuade butcher Ignatius G that we really did want a lung (just one) to try out just this recipe. Liz bakes the whole in a casserole dish.

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face..... haggis.

For a starter we diverged a bit away from Scottish fare with a favourite salad - leaves, pomegranate bits, goats cheese, pickled sweet red peppers and toasted pinenuts. The haggis came, of course, with neeps and tatties and an onion gravy. Dessert was a bit 'fusion food'. Liz crossed cranachan with pavlova (why not?) and came up with a pavlova with a meringue base, a good layer of cream, then blackberry coulis and berries, topped with toasted rolled oats.

Cranachan x Pavlova

We have, inevitably, a mountain of this food left over even though everybody bar Henry piled in with gusto and did it justice. H was a little excited at his first evening visit to 'Matt and Dizzy's' house and was not in the mood for settling down to eat this unfamiliar food but he was still a pleasure to entertain and he enjoyed himself. "Dizzy" (sorry, I mean Liz) has since been on the internet talking to chums who also have left over haggis and mashed spuds, and someone has come up with the very promising idea of haggis and potato 'pasties' which have GOT to be worth a try. We have very little 'neep' left so some of our lovely fresh sprouts may get thinly sliced and added to the pastie filling.

We had lit the fires at both ends of the house, so we had a lovely turf fire going in the living room as well as the range in the dining room. We do not usually have real turf in the house as we'd only use it on the open fire, which we don't light very often; it does not go very well in the range. However, I had taken some eggs round to neighbour Una and she was trying to pay me money for them. I asked instead if I might have some of the lovely long dry turfs she has in her shed; they look very picturesque in the log basket and would burn nicely on our fire for our guests when we adjourned through to the comfortable chairs. We didn't go very late. The visitors were mindful of the need to get little Henry to bed by 9:30-ish but, more importantly, K-Dub was due a very early (04:30) start as he's off to the Bavaria mountains on a motor bike, to be part of the annual "Elephant Rally", camping.

http://www.bvdm.de/index.php?id=47&lang=3

Rooster 'Mr Buff' shelters in the goose house. 

We take our hats off to you, buddy, rather you than me. The weather is not looking particularly promising, it is snowy and windy in Bavaria at present, but he has a good ex-military tent and a sleeping bag which is good to minus 30 degrees C and, anyway, hey! He's a ruffty tuffty biker. I used to enjoy my 2CV camps but they were generally in the summer and I had the car around me when I was driving to and from. K-Dub is on a bike in just his leathers and helmet through the night to Dublin, then all across Wales and England to the Channel Tunnel, then all across mainland Europe to his snowy forest 'home' and all his biker mates. Safe journey, K-Dub. Look after yourself.