Honey, honey

Apparently, Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends have become the times when we harvest honey. They are times I'm really starting to cherish.

Once we remove the part of the beehives that contains the extra honey, we take it into my parents' basement where we extract and jar it. As we do this, Pop tends to share memories of when he worked bees with his father or some other story from days gone by. We also get to sample the freshest honey ever.

As we insert each rack of honeycomb into the extractor, some of the golden goodness oozes onto the tray where we're working. Each of us takes a turn sticking our fingers into that honey, which otherwise will be washed down the drain, to sample the fresh harvest. The absolute best is when Mom emerges from her kitchen upstairs with warm homemade biscuits to eat with the surgery syrup.

It was interesting this weekend to see the difference in the color of the honey that we harvested compared to the one jar we have remaining from the Labor Day 2009 harvest. Here's the picture - the lighter colored one is the spring harvest.

Unlike chickens, where the breed determines the color of the eggs, the flowers in bloom at the time determine the color of the honey. We have been trying to remember what the bees were working to make this light honey compared to the darker fall harvest.

Spring means they largely gathered pollen from clover and persimmon trees. Last fall, we had planted some buckwheat in front of the hives specifically for the bees. That's what made the fall harvest darker. Some people don't care for the buckwheat honey, but I like it. It's got a stronger taste that is interesting to me.

The extraction process involves removing the top layer of the beehive. This requires encouraging the bees to move downstairs to the lower level of the hive. Usually, this is done by blowing smoke inside the hive with a smoker.

The upper level contains several racks of honey housed within the honeycomb. When we extract it, we use an electric, heated knife to remove the top layer of wax or caps off each side of the honeycomb. The racks are placed vertically inside the extractor. When cranked, like an old-fashioned ice cream maker, the honey flies out of the combs onto the sides of the extractor and slides down into the bottom of it. There's an opening in the bottom with a sliding door that you open to collect the extracted honey into a strainer before jarring it up.

It sounds like a complicated process, but you get into a routine and it goes pretty quickly. Plus, just when I think I've heard every old story Pop has to share, he comes out with another one.

Every time I eat a spoonful of honey, I think about the bees and the harvesting process and our time together. Like Dad, I'm finding the memories make the honey even sweeter.