Harvest

We harvested two 'frames' of capped honey from the TBH about a week ago. It was medium colored and super sweet (tooth-ache sweet) with the distinct but subtle flavor of licorice. Everyone who tries it takes a taste, stops for a moment, gets this confused look on their face and then says, 'there's something different about this honey...I can't quite place it.' They either eventually realize it tastes like licorice, or when we tell them that's the flavor, they go 'yeah, that's it!' We harvested a couple of quarts.

And now I am rendering the wax. Hard work. I bought a crock pot yesterday ($7 at Saint Vincent De Paul. It's the cool, yellow old-school one my mom had.) and pitcher to use expressly for wax rendering. I'm starting with a double boiler, which will allow me to skim the melted wax off the top of a pot full of water and other gunk. The next step will be to re-melt the wax in my way-cool retro crock pot and then pour it through some paper towels to sift off the remaining gunk. This is hard work for just a few ounces of wax from several combs.

Word on the street is that you should only try rendering wax from cappings--the thin, pure-ish wax the bees use to cover the fully cured honey for storage. I think that's probably a better idea. But hey, we never do things the easy way, and it seems a real shame to throw out all of the honey comb.