Jarring Up the Honey

 I'll start off this blog post with a quote about honey from a well-known expert on honey:

"A day without a friend is like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside." - Winnie The Pooh

How true that is, Pooh Bear.  We are thankful to God for our friends and we're thankful that we have several "pots" full of honey.  Our aim today is to empty the pots into jars.  We installed a honey gate on a food grade 5 gallon bucket, sterilized a bunch of jars that we purchased and got ready to pour the sticky, sweet, stuff into pint-sized jars.  We were doing it in the kitchen, so a secondary goal was to not make a sticky mess.

We uncapped the first bucket and got ready to pour it into the bucket with the honey gate on it.  That way you can control the flow.

And the process began!  I had to do a little fine tuning by tightening the screw on one side, but pretty soon, we had an assembly line going that would have made Henry Ford jealous.  I held the jar and controlled the honey gate.  Russ called out when to close the gate.  The jar was then given to Tricia who wiped the outside of the jar, tightened the lid and packed the full jars in cases.

We weighed the pint jar full of honey after zeroing out the kitchen scale to see where we were on the weight.  A pint jar of honey weighs a little more than a pound and a quarter.

We really like glass jars better, but we did purchase a few plastic jars with a squeeze top.  We made more than a case of those.

The honey is primarily Chinese Tallow Tree honey.  It is darker and has a richer taste profile (that sounds fancy, doesn't it?) than wildflower honey.  I decided to take a photo of the two different styles of jars of honey we made with a frame and the four bee boxes in the background.

I like the amber-like color of the Our Maker's Acres Family Farm honey when the sun shines through it.  

All in all we made 119 pint-sized jars of honey.  Not too shabby for the first time!  We'll eat all we can and sell the rest.  We're also planning to pull honey again in the fall.  That will primarily be Goldenrod honey.  It has a stronger taste and a pungent smell that, honestly, smells like sweaty gym socks, but it is good for you.

Fun Fact: It takes a bee 10,000,000 trips to collect enough nectar to make 1 pound of honey. -Sue Monk Kidd