Liquid Gold - Bees & Honey

Since today is a food day, I have been cooking and eating all day! Which is not how things usually are however,  I have been working on some more recipes and we had some tasting to do. Besides, what else would there be to do on a rainy Thursday at home?

Well, one other thing I have been doing is filtering honey through a muslin cloth into jars for storage. We just moved a hive to higher ground and in the shift had to remove quite a bit of old comb (they had lots) and ended up with some lovely honey.

Of course this is a messy job and everyone in the house wants to be in on it - so everyone and everything gets sticky! The one thing I have noticed myself doing (again) is comparing my honey from my own bees to something that would come in a jar from Tesco's for instance.

Of course, my first thought is that Tesco honey looks 'like honey' - which is what we as consumers have been trained to expect from a honey product. These thoughts brought me back to the years spent working on my honey project at CAFRE college in Northern Ireland and the things I found out about myself and others as a consumer (or a well trained monkey!)

Well, first of all, the honey we have in our hives is different from something found in a shop. We do not feed our bees and do not treat with anything. We also keep a large herb garden. But more then that, we use the comb honey, untreated, unheated - as is.

Unless I want some filtered for baking and cooking - which is what I am doing today, we eat the honey straight from the hives. I wouldn't' for the life of me want to alter anything this precious. 

However I know enough about this subject and how honey is processed before it arrives on a store shelf to understand that our perceptions of honey are shaped by what is available to us from a shop. When I was working on my study at CAFRE college, during some of the food labs, I surveyed people extensively about their tastes, preferences and expectations for honey.

What was uncovered was that none of their preferences were based in reality - people wanted medium coloured, light tasting, clear honey - the type that would indicate it was blended from multiple sources, heated to high temperatures and imported in from God knows where. 

Yet, they expected this commercially produced honey to be very good for them and have medicinal properties. 

Very few people would have known to use local honey, on the comb when you can get it, unheated, untreated - right out of the hive is best, especially if you want it for medicinal purposes. And that local honey colours and tastes vary from season to season as well as within each hive. 

Bees which have access to herbs such as thyme, sage, lavender and chamomile would produce a great tasting honey as well as perhaps be quite healthy and strong themselves. Each of these factors is important for us to know as informed consumers (taking the game to another level). 

If you like honey and have a back garden, you should consider keeping bees, you don't have much to do with them, just plant a few herbs or flowers and let them do their thing. 

They are an indicator species for the planet - if they fail to thrive, so do we. That seems pretty important to me.

Well, off to keep going with the honey!

Have a healthy day,

April

Top Bar hive in back garden

What’s Wrong with the Bees?

I have pondered this one for awhile and have gone back and forth trying to understand just why honey did not feel right. It is not an animal product per se, as it is produced by bees and does not come from their bodies such as milk would from a cow. 

We can safely remove some honey from bees and not kill or harm them, and honey has many beneficial healing properties. It was only after I became a beekeeper myself and got involved in the industry that I discovered the problem with commercial honey and perhaps the problem with the bees. 

Commercial honey producers supplement (there is that word again) their honey bees with white sugar made into a thick syrup. In a wet rainy summer like we have had for the past fews years in Ireland, the bees may be supplemented with this ‘food’ several times. 

This does a couple of things, it allows them to continue producing honey no matter what the weather, and it must also make them sick. As these are the bees that farmers are losing.

A commercial hive is bigger then a traditional one, housing more bees, feeding them is a common and expected practice, and then producers harvest all of the honey produced only to leave the bees with more sugar water for the winter and none of their own real food. 

This is a recipe for disaster- I finally knew what was wrong with the honey I bought in the shops, it was made from sugar, and not entirely from the pollen of various plants. Therefore with the energy and vibration of sugar, it aided in the depletion of the immune function (for the bees) and no longer acted in a therapeutic manner (for the humans). 

So we crossed commercial honey off our lists and now hopefully we will eventually produce our own from gently handled bees who are not fed anything other then what they can forage and they live in small eco friendly hives. 

I keep a herb and bee garden as well with many herbs and flowers that they like and hope to expand it from year to year. I would urge everyone to get some bees, and get going with bringing back this wonderful creature into its natural state - treat them right and nature will reward you. 

Have a healthy day,

April

The boys with the bees in the back garden