Honey Harvest with Brian Campbell's Bee School

 Yesterday I celebrated the Harvest Moon by mucking in with the honey extraction with Brian Campbell and his Bee School Students.

 From Brian's website:


Blessed Bee Farm aspires endeavors to integrate bees into the fabric of urban life by providing guest honey beehives to reside in neighbourhood backyards. Through offering courses and hands on workshops at our Bee School for novice and experienced beekeepers and for those interested in both honey bees and Canada’s native bees we strive to create a sustainable urban ecology that welcomes and supports bees and beekeepers. We are committed to excellence in all of our apiculture practices. Our concern is with the future of bees. Although we extract and sell honey the bees always come first. As healthy as honey is for people it is even better for the bees.

And being good to the bees means the raw honey tastes really good and it's good for you, full of the essential oils and pollen that the bees collect. This honey is coarse-filtered though sieves that just separate the larger piece of detritus such as wax and honey-drowned bees from the final product.

 

We get good and sticky and there are little pools of honey on the table. We taste the blonde frames: this is spring honey, light and tasting of lilies. The darker honey has a richer fuller taste, with that nutty butterscotch and caramel flavor. Once the frames have all been uncapped on both sides we stop for a snack of light fluffy goat cheese drizzled with honey. It is the colour of golden butterscotch and tastes of flowers and caramels. Brian tells us the flavours will blend and harmonize once the honey has been sitting in jars.  Somehow I don't think mine will be sitting around for long--it's going to be eaten pretty darn quickly.