August’s WI Meeting was a second talk from local bee keeper Simon Croson, after the success of his previous talk a few months earlier the summer social was sacrificed for ‘Products of the Hive’.
This time Simon brought with him a frame of bees, a frame loaded with honey and beeswax as well as lots of goodies for us to try.
The queen bee highlighted in the red square – with a white pen mark on her.
Simon with a frame of honey sealed over with beeswax.
Simon spoke about how he harvested the honey and demonstrated with the above frame. The results are below, a mixture of beeswax and honey, the honey drained through a sieve for us to try underneath.
It was completely different from the mass market honey that I’ve had before. We were told about the different products that could be made from the beeswax, including home-made cosmetics (get some ideas here), or a Millennium Falcon.
Simon also spoke about the pollen and how it’s collected and its reported health benefits, and also propolis, a resinous mixture that honey bees produce by mixing saliva and beeswax with exudate gathered from tree buds, sap flows, or other botanical sources.
Here are a few more pictures from the evening. Various different honeys, including ones mixed with pollen, but none of the Himalayan hallucinogenic honey – watch the YouTube video!
It’s really hard to do the talk justice in a blog post. But it was truly fascinating, and a great finisher to the previous one in May. So will Simon bee back? Who knows, but I would have thought so.
The Lincoln WI 