And there is my first crop of honey.
This has been a bit of a scrappy update. The main reason was because I wanted to delay the honey extraction even further than we already had, specifically until we'd won the alliance tournament, I was going to label it all up as "Hydra Honey, 2012 Tournament Winner Edition" or some such.
Then of course Sreegs happened, so that plan pooped, with no tourney testing to do any more, I figured I might as well extract that honey.
There was a brief plan to make an "arty" photo with the original honey labels screwed up in the bin, slightly blurred in the background, with the new "Hydra Honey, 2012 Stolen Tournament Edition" label on the jars. But :effort:, Sreegs destroyed much more that day than Soundwave's wildest dreams.
A little about this Honey.
Golden runny honey like this is late-year, from the Autumn. So this honey was produced when I was still living in Nottingham.
At the time of my moving to Stratford, the bees were out of sync with me and I did not get chance to harvest this honey last year.
Over last winter I fed the bees far too much, as a result, they didn't touch this honey, in the meantime they had managed finish off these 5 frames I harvested this spring.
So this honey is definitely 9 months old. The area it comes from is urban, within range of a natural river and a nature reserve, the choice of pollens and nectars was extremely varied. This honey is exceptionally floral in it's taste. I figure it's mostly from things like wild black berries. Honey bees do not routinely favour garden flowers, as flowers are not very numerous, remembering that it takes 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey, so what's the point of flowers right?
Honey bees like trees and crops mostly.
It's bumble bees that live in colonies of 50 that like flowers.
These 5 frames got me about 7 pounds of honey.
That's 14 million flower heads.