Sweet Results

"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
-- Winnie the Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner

It really is late and I should be asleep, but I quickly I wanted to post an update on the honey! This evening I attempted to extract the beeswax from the crushed and squeezed honeycomb that had drained its honey. Good old Google to the rescue here!

I covered the gloop taken from the mosquito net (see the last blog post to see what that was all about!) with boiling water and let it boil away for half an hour. It smelled lovely, a bit like Christmas really, and looked a bit like mincement but the "raisins" were actually dead bees!

This is what came out of the mosquito net

Boiling it all up

I was left with what seemed rather like Honey Soup. I poured it through a teatowel (held on by bungee cords ... whatever would we do without those things?) and into a large bucket. Liquid gold, so I am told. As it cools, the wax hardens and floats on the top (I'll check this in the morning). Real beeswax! How amazing! The goo left in the tea towel really amazed me, though. I laid it out in chunks on newspaper to dry and tomorrow I will take it to the village as I read that it makes an excellent fire-starter! That will be most useful. I love it when nothing is wasted!

Straining the "liquid gold"

 Fire-starter material! Go Jiko!

 

And so we have our first jar of honey! We still have more honeycomb hanging in the net and before we go off to the village in the morning, Lucy and I will get that down and then we'll see how many jars there are all together (something like 5 litres, I think).

 



 Gangilonga Honey 

It was a sticky and time-consuming unexpected job, but there are sweet results! Maybe I need to remember this as we go off to the village tomorrow. It has seemed like lots of things have been "sticky" and time-consuming recently and with no clay, unexpected water problems here in town, a broken washing machine and a car getting stuck in town, it is easy to feel stuck down! And I know that in the village these next few weeks, at times we will feel very stuck, but the goal is sweet and that's what I want to keep in mind!