Kitchen Gadget Girl Cooks

Last week I was up to my elbows in honey, as I prepared my hive for its new residents, arriving sometime the second week of April. My first batch of bees arrived last April, and blogging about their installation was one of my first posts on this blog. Unfortunately, my bees up and left sometime in December, for reasons which are still unknown to me. But, they left behind a hive full of honey and other interesting specimens.

In January, I put the hive atop a wheely cart and visited my kids’s classrooms, talking to their classmates about raising bees and where honey comes from and all that. Ever since, when I visit their classes, one or two children always come up to ask when the honey will be ready. I decided that last week was the time to get to it!

The two supers – the bottom one, closest to you, is the main box with the brood chamber and pollen stores. It is where the queen lives. The one in the back is the second super I added, mostly for more brood, but I think my bees ended up using it for honey storage. 

This is a frame with brood comb built up – the brood chamber is where the queen lays her eggs.

Up close on the brood frame. You can see a white larvae, and just down from that, what looks like an emerging bee.

These bees are actually not alive, but they remained on the comb, and I thought they were really photogenic. 

These are frames with capped and uncapped honeycomb. I use a special fork-like tool to scrape the cappings off. I save them, along with the beeswax from the comb and will melt it and see what fun projects come about.

And now onto harvesting the honey:

My bench scraper came in very handy for this process – I scraped the honey, along with comb, off the frame and into a colander set over a bucket. The bucket is from Safeway – I went to the Bakery and asked for an empty food-safe bucket. They were kind enough to provide one for this project.

After a day, most of the honey had drained down into the bucket, leaving the colander full of cappings and beeswax. I soaked the cappings and beeswax in water for two days, changing the water every 24 hours, and then left the wax dry. I have it stored in a container until later when I have time to melt the beeswax down.

The honey still had some small bits of beeswax floating on the top, so when I filled a couple jars, I strained the honey again. When the honey bears arrive, I will have to figure out another way to get the honey in that is less labor intensive and messy. Perhaps I will look into cheesecloth.

Final product – half-pint jars of Northern California honey! Such a sweet treat

With all the honey around my house, I thought a cookie with honey as a main ingredient would be a good choice. Fortunately, I was able to turn to my trusty Pooh Cook Book, by Virginia Ellison (1969), because as everyone knows, Winnie-the-Pooh is the king of honey!

I think this cookbook was my very first cookbook – I remember making Honey Toffee Pennies when I was a young girl. The book is divided up into Breakfasts; Smackerels, Elevenses and Teas; Provisions for Picnics and Expotitions; Lunches and Suppers; Dessert and Party Recipes; Christmas Specialities; and Honey Sauces. And as the author, Virginia Ellison, writes in the introduction, these recipes are meant to be interchanged between meals. She encourages Poohanpiglet pancakes for lunch. My kind of cookbook author.

Honey Oatmeal Cookies were the inspiration for my recipe today, and I adapted the recipe to make a larger quantity and a little crispier over all. This recipe would be great with chocolate chips, raisins or cranberries in place of, or addition to, the chopped walnuts.

Honey Oatmeal Walnut Cookies

• 1/2 cup (1 stick) of unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 cup of packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup honey
• 2 capfuls vanilla
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 cup oats
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350F. 

Cream butter and brown sugar together. Mix in honey and vanilla. Add eggs one at a time and beat well.

Mix flour, oats, baking soda and salt together. Add to sugar mixture. Mix well. Add in nuts.

Using your 1 1/2″ cookie scoop, drop cookies onto parchment lined cookie sheets. Bake 12-15 minutes, until lightly golden.

Every time I went out last week, I came across many signs of spring – eventually, I started taking my camera with me and captured some fun shots. My package of bees comes next month, but if they had been here now, they would have had all of this to feast on (see, food analogy!):

One of the frames from my hive, covered with yummy honey!

July 2008

Busy,

busy,

bees.

Thanks for the green beans

July 2008

Bees from my beehive

July 2008

(p.s. any ideas on how to take better bee pics?)

On April 29th, I picked up my package of bees – essentially a box with 30,000 bees plus a queen. And on Thursday night, May 1st, we installed the bees in my backyard hive!

Make sure the hive is ready, I removed a couple of the frames. The super is stacked atop 4 bricks. I wonder if I might have to move that around because of ants, however….

Make sure the smoker is going…1 sheet of newspaper, plus a handful of pine needles.

Take the feeding can that came with the package out – oh, did I mention, do this at night, or when it is cool. The bees will be a little quieter, a lot more docile.

Give them a little smoke, and then shake, shake, shake – get those bees into the hive. When they are all in, nestle the queen in her cage between two frames (leave her in the cage) and put a second empty super on top, put the feeding can in upside down, and put the lid on the whole thing. Leave undisturbed for 48 hours to let the queen settle in. After 48 hours, check and see how the bees are with the queen. Depending on their mood (and yours!) you might decide to leave her another 24 hours in her cage. Don’t wait much longer, or the cage might become part of the hive!