Dirty Honey & Smelly Jelly

In preparation for tomorrow's big hive split, today we cleaned up the dead out hives that did not survive the winter.  This involved extracting any remaining honey so the bees can reuse the equipment for this season's collection.  Honey extraction is sticky business and it is always a lot of work.  At least in the summer it is fun and satisfying seeing the clean, golden honey pour out of the extractor.  Cleaning old dead outs is not so fun.  It is a dirty job with lots of old wax flakes, dead bees and even some mould.  We do not extract honey from mouldy frames.  We scrape the honey and wax into the garbage and wash down the frames before giving them back to the bees to reuse.

The honey we extracted is on its way to a local brewery, Small Pony Barrel Works, to be used in a beer collaboration.  We are looking forward to seeing what exciting flavour combination they come up with this time!

We also managed to finish up our latest jelly experiment.  Our second batch of lilac tea, while admittedly less bitter than batch 1, was still only semi-palatable.  After some trial and error, the boys and I concocted a flower-tea collaboration of our own.  We settled on a mixture of three cups of steeped tea to one cup of lilac tea for an exciting new "lilac tea jelly".  We made both a green tea and a black tea variety.  I am happy to report that this time our jelly set, it has a lovely burnt amber colour and, best of all, it tastes good!  It has a noticeable lilac flavour without tasting like you are eating a bottle of perfume.

The general consensus; however, is that lilac jelly is not worth a repeat.  The boys have dubbed it "smelly jelly".  Of all the floral jellies we have made so far (dandelion, queen anne's lace, sunflower and lilac), it is our least favourite.  Next on our list - peony jelly.  Yup.  It's a thing.  We just need to wait for our peonies to bloom!