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Post by flowerweaver on Jul 20, 2015 15:47:53 GMT -5
Last week we extracted our first honey, after five years of beekeeping. The first two years I fed them sugar water to get them through the exceptional drought, which was an expensive and time consuming proposition. The third year they made a meager amount of honey and I let them have it. Last fall I robbed a few frames which I froze until I had more. That went smoothly. This time, however, instead of a few guard bees coming after me after smoking the hive, about 300-500 attacked, and stayed on my suit until I'd walked about an eighth of a mile away. I think my clipped queen has died and the new one must have mated with a more aggressive local drone. I'm just glad my suit prevailed. They are not aggressive otherwise, I am able to stand within a yard or two of their entrance without their ire. The apiary where I purchased them says they do breed for some aggression, but these have probably gone beyond their level. For some unknown reason, most of my "commercial quality" hive bodies and supers are rotting and falling apart, and I will soon have to transfer these bees into new digs. I'd rather wait until fall when the hive dies down. I'm debating whether to re-queen or not at that time which would be easier. I really don't relish pissing them off further. Most of the local beekeepers I know have lost their gentle bees to hive beetles, wax worm, mites. All of my gentle swarms eventually left for the same reasons. So there's something to be said for these bees in a time when so many colonies are collapsing. A local beekeeper told me agressive bees often won't accept a new queen. I'd really hate to have to kill them. Although I was hoping for a light wildflower honey, I think that nectar was lost to the rains. This appears to be a mixture of Mesquite flower and Oak Honeydew. We got 5 liters. It is delicious, tasting very much like molasses. But it's kind of gross to think about--in case you are unfamiliar, honeydew is the sweet, sticky substance that aphids exude when biting into oak leaves as Wikipedia kindly says "out their terminal end" which the bees then collect and store.
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Post by steev on Jul 20, 2015 19:02:52 GMT -5
Wow! Aphid excrement! That nearly puts me off the dehydrated bee-regurgitate.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 20, 2015 19:57:05 GMT -5
Lol! Steev beat me to the punch line....
We put some colonies far out in the desert where there was no alfalfa nearby. It came back dark as heck, and the most delightful of any that I have ever harvested.
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Post by philagardener on Jul 20, 2015 20:12:27 GMT -5
Nifty, although with bee aggression "just enough" sounds like a difficult balance.
Is that a Pink Berkeley Tie Dye in there for steev?
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Post by jondear on Jul 20, 2015 20:24:04 GMT -5
Up here, buckwheat honey is dark like that. A few years ago we got some mangrove honey in Florida that was pretty dark too. I find dark honey more robust.
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Post by flowerweaver on Jul 20, 2015 21:11:28 GMT -5
steev I try not to think about the strange path of this honey! Joseph, do you think yours was also honeydew honey? I'll have to agree it's the best tasting I've had yet. I've heard buckwheat makes a honey this dark. philagardener LOL, good tomato eye. Yeah, that's going to be a difficult call on what to do. I'll talk to some of the area beekeepers to get their perspective since they are used to Texas bees.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 20, 2015 22:59:21 GMT -5
No telling where honey comes from out in the desert...
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Post by steev on Jul 21, 2015 2:15:04 GMT -5
That Pink Tie-Dye wasn't for me; I tried it, but it was insipid, though pretty.
Even in 60's Berkeley, I never wore tie-dye, just not my thing.
Had I a hive, I'd be getting star-thistle honey now; it's not bad, though pale yellow and mild.
Re aphids: I was once watching those sucking the undersides of leaves on my grapefruit, when I noticed that every-so-often they would pretty simultaneously shake side-to-side once, all over the tree; I have no idea what that was about or how it was coordinated.
I once found a sort of "honey-pot" ants in Oakland; which was unexpected, as I'd thought they were all out in the desert. I ate a few, being curious; they weren't bad, but only faintly sweet, neither spicy nor acid. I suppose that was aphid excrement and un-dehydrated ant regurgitate. Wow! Cali's foodie culture being what it is, these days, I bet if I ran a bunch of those through my Granny's laundry wringer and boiled it down, I could get premium-wine prices for it from "cutting-edge" chefs and mixologists, at least for one season. Hmm; maybe if I concoct a good enough line of BS and keep the provenance "secret", I can make a few bucks...
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Post by RpR on Jul 21, 2015 10:56:39 GMT -5
Ok honey boys, is there any honey source that is as light in taste as clover? I once bought a jar of what was called Basswood Honey because it had the taste I like but only that one jar of Basswood ever came close to what I will eat.
Does the type of clover, genuine not a misnomer like sweet clover, make a difference in the flavor of the honey.
I am very, very, very fussing about the taste of honey I will willingly eat. If it strays too far from the comb honey grandma used to have, I will avoid it like the plague.
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Post by flowerweaver on Jul 21, 2015 15:33:12 GMT -5
RpR my area once was the leading exporter of tons of honey, and won first place for best tasting honey at the 1900 world's fair in Paris. At that time all the honey was clear as glass and came from guajillo plants also called white brush. Overgrazing and development has killed off a lot of this southwest Texas shrub. There is still one apiary producing it but it's getting harder to come by.
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Post by templeton on Jul 21, 2015 16:58:04 GMT -5
A bit off topic, but does anyone do eucalyptus honey in the US? Cal has lots of Euc doesn't it? pity you don't have Yellow box - E.melliodora - yum! And for reference, an (Oz?) invention for honey extraction direct from hive has received a bit of attention on one of my Oz gardening forums. Might be dumb - or not. I know nothing about keeping bees. www.honeyflow.com/T
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 21, 2015 19:42:09 GMT -5
If you don't like to think about where the honeydew comes from you can always try to cover it a little more and call it sapin, like the French and Spanish do.
Buckwheat honey might be sapin based, it depends on whether buckwheat flowers make nectar (I don't know, never grown buckwheat) Honeys from wind pollinated plants are usually sapin based. That means a lot of the tree honeys are, oak, pine/fir, corbolezzo (the bitter, mentholated tasting honey gotten in Italy from the flowers of the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo). Presumably that soliga honey I used to buy was sapin based, since it came from the forests of the Himalayan lowlands (I suppose it depends on what kind of trees grow there). Ditto that weird Balinese one made by the Balinese native giant honeybees.
A store near me actually sells rhododendron honey, which has always worried me, as I always heard rhododendron nectar was poisonous (Oleander nectar is VERY poisonous, but since it is fatal to the bees as it is to us, you won't usually find honey of it.)
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Post by flowerweaver on Jul 21, 2015 21:28:45 GMT -5
T, I saw the Honeyflow hives when they were doing a kickstarter, very intriguing. The pricing isn't all that bad if it works as it claims. I use Brushy Mountain's 8 frame English garden hives because they are smaller boxes and are easier to lift by myself. A box full of honey weights 35 lbs instead of 90 on the 10 frame standard hives. Having a full size hive I didn't have to lift might be worth it. blueadzuki I've read that Beech honeydew honey fetches quite a premium in Europe. The honey taste I don't understand is Sourwood. I find both the smell of the tree's flowers and the taste off-putting, yet it's very loved.
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Post by steev on Jul 21, 2015 21:45:40 GMT -5
I have no awareness of euc honey in Cali, but I have no idea what's available.
Cali's eucs are mostly blue euc (for windbreaks and firewood) and flame euc (for urban street-trees). I once made the mistake of throwing a fresh chunk of flame euc into my hot fireplace; pretty much like a melon-sized ball of rubber tire.
I think people are starting to see the sense of eradicating the blue euc, here; we just don't have the biome to break it down well, so it's oily detritus builds up, discouraging the native biota, and just waiting for a spark. I remember the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 (more than 1000 homes burned; many people fried; blue eucs exploding like bombs, very impressive; my daughter and her friend played in my backyard in a "snow-storm" of falling ash all day. It was planted all along the SF East Bay hills to replace the native redwoods (which were mostly cut to re-build San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake/fire); the idea was that it would be good for lumber; well, no, as it has turned out; too hard to process. It's good firewood, although it takes twice as long to dry as oak or black acacia (California koa), both of which are easier to process and more ecosystem-fit.
We need tall trees on the East Bay hills as we get high fog in Summer, which they catch, feeding springs to the flatlands, which ameliorates the dry season, just not eucs.
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Post by walnuttr on Aug 23, 2015 3:35:05 GMT -5
" mostly blue euc (for windbreaks and firewood) and flame euc (for urban street-trees). " Steev, as a shivering woodfired homesteader, what are those two trees in Latin Names ? sounds like just the rightr stuff to grow as short-rotation shelter trees in between the new walnut stands. Much more useful as firewood than the poplar and Monterey pine I used with the first woodlot. Maybe Templeton can also suggest a good firewood Euc.....easy split, fast grow, single leader...?
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