First Crop

A very important post! As the oilseed rape faded from gold to green we arranged to hire the club extractor for a fiver. We picked it up on Sunday, and by Monday, we were ready for action.

We wore old clothes, and sheets of newspaper swathed the kitchen floor, the table and any clear surfaces. We had a serrated bread knife to uncap the comb and some industrial sized baking trays to take the wet cappings. A few jam saucepans were ready to collect any strip drips and we found two sieves to filter out any impurities. Ted Hooper was, as ever, on standby...

Liam went out to take the supers off the hive and managed without too much difficulty. We had used two Porter bee escapes, and these had got rid of all but a few bees. So far, so good.

Next was the problem of what to do with the liquid that came out when you shook some of the frames. Karen, another

Frome beekeeper had suggested we extract this "nectar" first and keep it separate from the honey. We put these frames into the extractor, nervously started it up and got about 4 jars of liquid. The consistency was not at all like honey (too watery) and we were glad that we took the time to do this first. Had we merged it with the honey, I think it might have encouraged it to ferment. Instead, I suspect we may explore the possibility of mead!

Next, we used our everyday bread knife to slice off the cappings from the comb. This was hugely time consuming and I suspect we took off far too much, but we did seem to get a bit quicker by the end. (Although as we finished at twenty minutes past midnight, this may have been out of sheer desperation to get the job done!!) The bread knife was definitely up for the job although we reckon a smaller serrated knife would also be good for small bits of undulating comb - a serrated grapefruit knife perhaps?

We tried our best to follow instructions and load consecutive bits of comb opposite one another into the extractor (for better balance) but in all honesty, it didnt seem to make a

huge amount of difference. We also tried not to get over enthusiastic with our spinning in an effort to preserve the combs and I dont think we did too badly.

Finally, we filtered the honey through our ordinary kitchen sieves - one plastic, one metal, and into a plastic 15kg honey bucket where we left it to settle for 24 hours.

Needless to say we couldnt resist taking a jar to "taste" - and it is good! Very sweet and very long tasting with none of the cabbage taste I was worried about. This first test jar does have lots of bubbles - noticeably more than the jars we

are now bottling up. (Another tip we learnt by accident - by covering the honey bucket top with cellophane, which "rested" on top of the honey, when we came to remove it, all of the air bubbles and surface "scum" was removed with it - far more neatly than we could have done).

We started off bottling into all the jars we had carefully saved over the winter. However, I couldn't bear seeing our precious honey being decanted into jars still sticky from the old labels so we ended up buying some new ones. At twenty odd p a jar I dont think this is too extravagant...

24 hours later, there was still no sign of crystallisation which prompted me to ask Norman if it was definitely oil seed rape honey. Apparently the sweetness is a giveaway - and it might change colour / texture in the next few days. We await developments with interest...

So far we have bottled 23 1 lb jars with another 2/3 of the honey bucket remaining. This gets done tonight.