Honey and bees

Since it has been such nice weather here for us in Utah this winter, we decided last weekend to go check on our beehives to see if our bees were still alive (seeing as the temperature was in the 60's). We are sad to report that neither one of our two hives made it through the winter. One of the hives we didn't really expect to make it through the winter since it had a slow start and did not seem to be incredibly productive all together. The other hive, however, we were quite surprised to find that it did not survive because it had done so well all throughout the summer and fall! Such a bummer.

On the bright side, we now have about 30 lbs of delicious honey! We harvested one of the hives last weekend and then finished up with the other hive this weekend.

Here is what we did...

First, we took a frame out from the hive and observed how cool it looked.

Second, we cut out the pieces of honey + comb.

Next, we crushed it up.

Finally, we strained the honey and put it into jars and voila! This is what you end up with...

The bottom ones that are a different color are the ones we did last weekend, which have now begun to crystallize. Apparently when you put your honey right from the hive into jars without heating it up/pasteurizing it, it starts to turn cloudy pretty quickly. We decided not to alter our honey since we tend to think that the more "natural" it is, the better. The appearance of this honey might make it look less appealing, but man it sure tastes great and is easier to spread!

The top jars of honey are the ones we processed this weekend... hence the darker color (which is what our other ones looked like too once upon a time). We even have cinnamon sticks in a few of the jars to try to make cinnamon honey because we recently tried some at a local beehive store and it was INSANELY AMAZING! Hopefully it works out and tastes as delicious and we remember.

We already have our order in for more bees for this upcoming season... we are eager to try again and hope we will be more successful at keeping our bees alive this time around.

Hopefully this inspires some of you to invest in some of your own bees... they are some of the most fascinating creatures that exist! And they are also critical for our food supply, so if you like to eat food and want to continue to survive, you might gain a little more appreciation for the hard work that they do. If you are looking for more information on bees or need a place to get some, let us know and we would be happy to point you in the right direction and get connected with the people who have the bees/supplies :)