Tag: honey for sale

Borage honey

Posted onAuthorAndy

We have been having a run on borage honey. It has a delicate flavour and, as you can see from the picture below, it has a light appearance, almost transparent. Here you can see it alongside a jar of our summer flower honey.

borage honey

Borage is a herb, grown commercially for its oil.

From the bees’ perspective it has good and bad traits, mostly good.

It comes into flower in the break between other flowering crops and so offers a valuable source of mid-summer pollen and nectar, when the colony is at its strongest and in need of food.

Its sugar balance also means that it does not set quickly, and so is easy to extract from the hive. This also makes it easy for the bees to eat, without needing to add lots of water themselves to liquify it.

The only downside is that it only comes ‘on flow’, ie is nectar bearing, for a couple of weeks. If, as is often the case in the summer, we have a couple of damp weeks that coincide with flowering, then the bees don’t fly much and can miss the crop entirely.

Adding in the fact that the crop itself is only grown to specific order, this all gives me, the beekeeper, a fairly rare, interesting and valuable honey.

Extracting raw honey

Posted onAuthorAndy

One of the most common questions I am asked concerns the process of extracting raw honey from our hives. The pictures below hopefully help explain the natural and sympathetic methods used.

Andy Bennett bee apiaryWe start in the apiary with the hives. The box at the bottom is called the ‘Brood Box’, where the queen lives and lays her eggs. This is the only permanent part of the hive. On top of this box are the ‘Supers’; the stronger and larger the colony the more Supers we add. They are shallow boxes, where the worker bees store the honey and are the boxes which we remove and extract the honey from.

 

honey extracting 1Here my helper is carrying a Super back to the house. They weigh around  20kg when full.

 

 

 

 

 

 

honey extracting supers 2honey extracting 3The far left picture  shows the pile of Supers ready for extraction. The second picture is of the view looking down onto the top of a Super. You can see the frames in position, with one frame laying on top. It is fully ‘capped’, with wax covering over the honey filled cells, indicating that the honey is ripe.

 

 

 

 

IMG_20150821_105121 honey extracting 4 honey extracting 6

The 3 pictures above show the extraction process. The first stage in extracting the honey from the frame is to remove the wax capping. The first picture is a little misleading as, what looks like a drum is actually a spinning brush. It is used to brush off the wax cappings from the frame, which you can see held under the brush.

The second picture shows the uncapped frame (you can see the honey glistening) being inserted into the extractor: a motor driven centrifugal spinner. The frames sit like the spokes in a wheel. As the wheel spins, the honey simply flies out. The third picture shows the honey draining from the bottom of the extractor into a food grade container.

The honey is now stored until needed. It will then be warmed gently to turn it liquid (as all honey will set in store), before jarring up.

That really is it.

None of the goodness is removed and nothing done to damage the complex structure or subtle make-up of the honey.  Raw honey is a good description and you can find out more about how to buy it here.