Homesteading Middles: Harvesting Honey

Homesteading in the beginning is a lot of planting sticks in sawdust, building chicken coops, watering seedlings, navigating bee swarms, spraying growing fruit trees with neem oil, on and on.

We are slowly moving into the harvesting part of this cycle where the efforts of earlier years are bearing fruit. In this case, our first honey harvest - 30 months after introducing the girls to their new home by the comfrey.

Here is what I learned from the process.

Set up the harvesting area away from the house. Once the bees find the honey that has oozed, dripped, spilled, and spread all over the table they don’t leave until they eat it all up again. Which means, unless you want to brave many stinging friends - your work is done.

Sometimes the centrifuge doesn’t work and you need to grab the warm comb and squeeze out the honey. This action is primal and decadent. It is carnal and glorious. It is Bacchus squeezing grapes into wine directly into your gullet amazing and magnificent. Watching your children do it feels like love explosions.

Honey from our own land is the most hyperlocal eating we have ever done. The bees live where we can see them. They harvest pollen from the flowers we can see. They drink water from the puddles on our driveway. They create honey listening to our dog bark and the ringing of the dinner bell.

The cycle of us feeding land feeding us is so wee in this. Smaller even then eating vegetables we have grown because we don’t plant our own seeds. Aside from 3 weeks in the shoulder seasons when we feed them bee tea, with sugar from Florida most likely, it is all here. As we get better and better at this I would like to move away from all bee tea. All steps in the right direction.