Waaaaaaayyy Off Topic! Canning for the road!

WilliamA

I hope this isn't too far afield for the crowd but in point of fact, I depend upon our farm/garden larder for a good bit of my travels so it pertains if you stretch the rubber band tight enough. Besides, it's fun and interesting and I thought a few of you might enjoy a side trip!
In addition to the many fruits and vegetables, meat and poultry we process here at the dry dock, Kathy has 2 hives of bees. It's honey collecting time here so I thought I'd put up a bit of a walk-through on that. Kathy pulled one "super" off of one of her hives and we processed the honey over the past 3 days. Here's a photo-pictorial (sp?)
Here's the "super" she pulled off one of her hives. The "frames" that the bees build comb and fill with honey hang on the inside of the super. There are 10 frames per super, but we only processed 8 out of this one. She put the other 2 back in the hive. My brother Joe brought over 5 frames he had from his bees and we processed all of the honey into a blend. Our honey is mostly basswood with a bit of dandelion and various yard flowers so it's a very light color and delicate taste. My brothers is mostly clover and corn pollen so it is much darker in color and has a heavy clover flavor.
The tool is used to pry up the super and also separate the frames from each other in the super.

The frames (2 at a time) get the cap comb cut off and then go into the stainless steel extractor where it is spun up by hand for a few minutes per side to get the honey out of the comb. The frames are then turned over and spun again for the other side.

Once the honey starts to build up in the extractor, the "honey gate" is opened and we dump the honey out into the 6 gallon plastic container through a strainer in the funnel. The first straining gets off 90% of the wax bits that have been thrown off the comb as well as a lot of cap-comb bits. The cap-comb will be processed by boiling to purify it, then made into lip-balm and leather treatment as well as other things. Cap-comb is the purest wax in the hive. While the bees often recycle comb wax, they always make new wax for the cap-comb.

After spinning out 13 frames of comb (8 of Kathys and 5 of my brothers) we ended up initially with this much honey. After netting the wax in cheese cloth and hanging it overnight to run dry, we ended up with 3.85 gallons/ 42lbs of pure honey.

I don't "mess" with the bees. That's Kathys thing. But I do the lions' share of the honey processing. I won't say it's a particularly arduous job, but it takes a good deal of time to do properly and with attention to cleanliness detail. It took me the better part of 2 days to process and bottle this much. The once-strained honey comes into the kitchen where I strain it a second time through a finer filter and 2 layers of cheese cloth. This also helps to mix the honey blend a bit more. It takes all night to run this much honey through the fine filters. While that's going on, I am busy washing and sanitizing all of the jars, lids and rings. Everything that touches the honey gets 2 thorough washings.

Here's the finished product. I canned 11 quart and 12 pint jars of honey. We gave my brother 4 quart and 4 pint jars.

We'll do this all one more time yet this year as Kathy still has 1 hive to harvest. There should be 40 lbs in that one as well. In lieu of carrying sugar for my camping, I always carry a plastic sealed container of honey for baking, coffee, tea and cereal. Pretty much anything that I would use sugar in gets a dose of this goo.

Hope you enjoyed it! I enjoyed sharing!

WilliamA