Lughnasa                                                              Honey Moon

I’ve been on vacation.  A bee vacation.  Kate and I started prepping on Tuesday, extracted on Wednesday, cleaned up and dried honey on Thursday and spent some of this morning finishing clean up and rendering wax.

This cappings tank functions as a solar oven, letting the honey drip down from the cappings through slots and holes in a tray that sits inside the tank and under the lid.

Yesterday I watched a youtube video on wax rendering and a guy used a two-hundred dollar solar oven for separating wax from impurities.  I thought, hey.  I can do this with my cappings tank.

So I copied his screen mesh covered with a layer of paper towel, put that on the tray under the lid and put the cappings and gathered wax from other times on it.  And voila!  Pure yellow wax is now gathering, floating on water in the tank, the only energy source the sun.  No pots, no double boilers, no crock pots, no fancy insulated tanks.

Four years ago I bought candle molds with the intention of making, well, candles.  I have a new skill learning resistance when I’m learning too many things at once and the wax rendering, candle making hit my barrier every time we finished extracting.  Too weary.

This time though Kate and I had the extracting figured out, made it work, so I could learn how to dry honey and render wax.  Next is making candles from the wax.  With the rendering so simple, it will become a regular part of the extracting process.  As will candle making.

So we learned two new skills this extracting season.

Lughnasa                                                                      Honey Moon

This old body.  It takes longer to recuperate.  Yesterday I wasn’t sure I’d feel fine ever again.  Today, I’m back.  Lifting, standing, bending all those things Warren said are good 

(the 19% pail)

Anyhow Kate and I had to wrestle with a water content problem in our last pail of honey.  It had a too much, 19%.  Checking various websites and forums discouraged even trying to dry it below 18.6% without professional drying rooms.  With determination though we found a technique that involved lowering the water content of 10% of the whole to 15%, then mixing it back in.  Kate hit on using the convection fan in our oven along with the 120 degree heat necessary.  We used a shallow glass pan and after 12 plus hours lowered the water content in the pan to 14.8 or so.

After mixing it back into the larger quantity, we achieved a reading much more in line, 17.5%.  We had another quantity filtered out of the cappings which also had a higher than desirable %, 19 like the other batch.  So we poured it in to the rest and achieved an 18.2% reading.  Perfect.

We had to order another 48 1 pound containers.  We’ve got a lot honey.  We’re going to sell it this year for $8.00 a pound.  This is raw honey, no chemicals (hopguard is a food additive).  Plus, it’s artisanal, produced in small batches.  If you want some, send me an e-mail or comment on this article.