bits and pieces

~~~BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ!~~~

and on this farm we have some bees, e-i-e-i-o!

crushing the comb so the honey can ooze out. i now imagine that any movie where someone gets realeased from some organic goop-bubble - i imagine the special effects are just colored honey.

so bees. what up with that?

so if you have a farm-ish and want bees to help pollenate your garden, you can either catch a swarm, buy some locally around April, or have them shipped to you (we hadto get them shipped, because we did not get ourselves on the waitlist for local bees fast enough). When your box of bees is delivered, there are 2 plugs. The smallest one you open first; it contains the Queen bee, and she is trapped in a candy cage. You put the caged queen in your hive (we have a top-bar beehive). After that, pull the larger plug off the box of bees and literally pour the rest of the hive into their new home (it's a lot like pouring cereal). put some sugar water in there with them and plug upthe exit for a couple of days until they eat the cage that contains the queen and accept their new home

we let our bees have run of the garden all summer and let them eat their honey stores through winter. In spring, once there are more flowers for them to work with, we lift the remaining honey out of the hive and take it for ourselves

We break up honey comb and put it in quart jars. We take the handle of a wooden spoon and crush the honey comb so that the honey can drain out. On an emptyjar, we attach cheesecloth to the mouth of the jar. We duct tape the jar mouths together, then turn them so the one with honey is on top. Slowly, the honey will filter through the cheesecloth into the empty jar, leaving the beeswax and whatever else behind, resting on the cheesecloth.

we can heat up the wax to separate it out from whatever else is leftover and then I use that to make chapsticks (they're amaaaazing!)