Honey, Bees, and Yoghurt!

It all started when the yoghurt flopped. I make my own yoghurt you see. It’s so enjoyable; it’s like being an alchemist. You start with this thing and then overnight it becomes something else! It transpired out of necessity though, as I am not prepared to eat Gelatin (often obtained from pig skin and cattle bones) or Pimarison (an anti-fungal additive implicated in various allergic reactions) so I got into the habit of making our own from raw milk or hormone free milk. If you’d like, I can explain how to make it?

And it always works, except on one very cold night when I left it to cool and it got too cool and I decided to not reheat it to see what happened. The next day it was still milk, not surprising really! Same same only a little bit creamier.

So I thought to turn it into ice-lollies for the kids. Add honey, some vanilla, freeze it and everyone’s happy. Except we’d just run out of honey. And I had been forbade to buy any honey as we have our own beehive and there was still a full frame of honey in the freezer from the last time we’d harvested.

So, in order to do this little thing, I had to strain and bottle the last frame of honey first.

A bee hive frame, if you’ve never seen one, is a moveable wooden element that holds the honeycomb in the hive. Once the bees have filled it with honey, you just lift it out, leaving some full frames behind for them!

Bee farmers use spinners to extract the honey from honeycombs, leaving them intact so that bees fill them up faster as they don’t have to rebuild the combs first. We don’t have a spinner so we scrape the honey and honeycomb off the wax, press it all though a fine strainer in a messy delicious process which results in bottles of clean raw honey and some sticky kitchen items which I usually leave out for the bees to clean the next day.

It’s a fun process to watch; first one curious little bee flies past, stops mid-flight and checks out this stash of honey. He fills up, leaves, and returns with ten buddies who then return with a hundred buddies and so it goes until you have an entire hive’s worth of bees on your porch having the time of their lives!

It was all going well, until I noticed that the dew had watered the honey down in the night and the bees were drowning in it! Now, when bees are out harvesting, they have nothing to protect and are therefore passive, this is very important to understand, it is also very important to believe when you and your daughter undertake the task of rescuing hundreds of drowning bees! The idea was to lift the frame, spoons and strainer out of the bowl full of watered-down honey and tip the bowl over so that the bees could crawl out of the puddles of honey on their own. Suffice to say, we were covered with bees, but it was fine, as long as we worked slowly and didn’t get honey on us.

To be surrounded by a swarm of bees all frantically trying to have their fill was an awesome experience. My daughter insisted that she had to stay and help until every last bee was dry! They were drunk and delirious you see! 

We didn’t get stung!  

Please forgive the camera shake in the images; you try hold still with bees crawling all over you!

Oh, and the yoghurt lollies were a raging success!

Ps. Do not try this at home! The bee part I mean, try the lolly part at home. with any kind of milk or yoghurt. You’ll be very popular!