August brings the last honey extraction of the season and that means time for borage honey extracting. Borage is a beautiful blue flowered herb grown for its oil. It flowers over a very short period and, if you prepare well, and are lucky, your bees will bring it in as a single crop.
It doesn’t always work, but when it does, the honey is crystal clear and has a lovely delicate, light sweet taste, with a slight tang at the end. Its composition also means that it can take a year to set, compared to, for example, oil seed rape honey, which will set in a couple of weeks.
This year we had 100 acres of borage grown near to us, so we made sure we were ready for it. The first stage of honey extracting is to remove the wax capping over the honey, placed there by the bees to store it, and by default showing us that it is ‘ripe’.
The next stage is the extracting process itself. The frames are put into an extractor like the spokes in a wheel and spun. The honey simply flies out from the centrifugal force. No heat, no pressure, nothing unnatural.
The result from a little extra work is pure borage honey.
I jarred it up this morning and you can see the results below.
I have held up the jar of borage honey (on the left) against a jar our our regular mixed season honey, so that you can see just how clear it is.
We were lucky, in that 3 of the 13 supers we extracted were pure borage.
Last year we had none, next year who knows, but I love the ‘chase’ to get the purest of single crop honey. The fact that it is also my favourite tasting honey of all is a bonus. Get it while it lasts.
I’ve bought borage honey, but never seen borage oil for sale. Do you know what it’s used for, Andy?
Hi Z
You can buy it from specialist shops as pure oil in capsules etc. It is supposed to include good fatty acids for skin and a shiny nose (Ah wait that might be for dogs).
I think that the main use at the moment is in cosmetic creams, lotions and oils for skin treatment.
From the farmers’ perspective, they need fewer interventions, as it is unaffected by slugs and pigeons. It also doesn’t get hit by the beetle which attacks Oil Seed Rape (and which resulted in neonicotinoid use and then its banning), so it is a good crop for a number of reasons.
Personally I like the odd flower in pimms and the more borage honey we can get the better.
Andy