Harvest Followup

I had the happy privilege of dropping off my first official jar of honey harvest to the winner of my previous contest. In case you don't recall I promised a jar of honey to the first person who could correctly find the bee in a picture of my hive when it was still in my backyard. The winner was really excited about her prize.

I waited a few more days to let the rest of the honey drip out and more importantly to let any rogue wax bits or other debris float to the top. After it appeared to have settled I went about doing some rough calculations to find out how many jars I would need. Turns out I had about 2 liters of honey. I started about filling my jars up, but once again my homemade valve made this process excruciatingly long. Eventually I managed to fill them all up, after which I'd let them sit a few days and then skim off any debris that made it into the jars and here's what I was ended up with.



Now that I had honey I need to decide what to do with it and sticking with my original plan I decided to make some Baklava, one of my favorite desserts. I stuck with the recipe of my favorite TV chef Alton Brown. It wasn't as hard or labour intensive as I thought it would be, however in future I might boil the syrup less to give it a slightly more liquid consistency. After a night of baking, I let it sit for a night to let all the syrup soak in. The next morning I had a piece, and in all honesty, I wasn't really impressed. However, it seems to get better with age as later in the week I was addicted and would recommend the recipe to anyone else who's a Baklava fan.



As for the bees I'm sure they've had a tough week, the weather has been really crappy of late. The nights have been dropping below zero and the daily highs have been single digits. The forecast for this week is looking better, double digit highs, so I plan to start getting all my winter prep done. This includes moving the hive to the acreage within city limits. I'll be sure to post about the move as soon as possible.