Is it business or pleasure? Well that depends on what you regard as business and what you regard as pleasure. To us, business is pleasure.
“The Business,” a honey cocktail
Recipe inspired by: London’s Milk & Honey Cocktail Bar
Shake and pour over ice.
Beekeepers on swarm duty this spring, it’s time for a drink. Vámonos!
Recipe from: http://wiki.webtender.com/wiki/Canchánchara
Pour the honey and the lemon juice into the glass and stir until the honey has dissolved. Add the rum, the ice and the water and stir.
Despite quite convincing threats, the Kerry hive never swarmed. And you know what that means — HONEY.
Mighty tasty light Spring honey from my "Fringecrest" neighborhood in Albuquerque
Over the past couple days, I’ve harvested 25 pounds of fragrant Spring honey from the Kerry hive whose occupants gave up swarming in favor of foraging. Every bar but two in that hive was filled with either honey, brood, or pollen which means my kitchen has been sacrificed to the honey gods for a full-time straining operation.
I’m out of strainers, I’m out of jars. And yet the honey still flows.
Vintage 2009
Albuquerque bee-man TJ Carr is endlessly engineering new tools and methods to ease the plight of top-bar beekeepers like myself. His latest nugget of beekeeping wisdom is a gravity-filtration system for honey harvesting from top bar hives.
This weekend, I tried it for myself. With a filtration system dependent totally on gravity and 24 lazy hours, let’s just say it fit right into my schedule.
Gravity Honey Filtering
Wanna try it for yourself? Here are some more details to get you started.
Continue reading
To some it’s a chili-laden hot dog from The Dog House. To others, it’s anything covered in chopped green from Frontier or a bowl of posole on Christmas Eve (Ay dios mio, even Rachael Ray has a posole recipe).
To the 30,000 honeybees living in my backyard, Albuquerque quite literally tastes like flowers. Continue reading
Here’s another lesson from the Albuquerque bee man, TJ, and his rooftop hives.
Comb filled with tight even worker brood like this is pure eye candy for the beekeeper opening her hives in Spring. Lots of worker brood means a strong workforce able to harvest spring nectar.
At my place in the city of Albuquerque, the girls will find nectar from a variety of trees such as apricot, elm, honey locust, and a variety of other flowering fruit trees maintained by urban gardeners. Thought, this year, my girls arrived late (I just received my package a couple of days ago) TJ’s bees have been hard at work for over a month. In fact, when I snapped the photo shown above, his girls were already bringing in honey and the gray pollen characteristic of elm trees. It’s the start of a rockin’ year for the hive.
Photo by Joy Godfrey
mistress beek 
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