All Decked Out

Well a few of you have been asking where have I been and why no blog posts for awhile...aw it's good to know you miss me and my giveaways too, never fear I have a few coming up soon.

Well we had this ugly gravel  area out from our back door and we decided (well I talked DH into it really) and in our naivety thought it would  take about a month to complete, ha well it has gone on so long now we have forgotten when we started it. (it's best that way I think)

We were either rained off or it got to hot to work, so we ended up playing a  dodge the weather game. 15+ trips to the tip with all the broken concrete and rubble,  drilling holes for 1,500+ screws but we are almost done... so is the decking  :) Just a few more tweaks with repairs to the crepi walls and find some furniture and we might get a chance to sit out and watch a few shooting stars next month.

Happy Weekend 

Honey Honey

Had a brilliant morning with my nieghbours Suz & Gerald who called me to say they were going to check on  their bee hives the following morning and asked me if I would like to come and see/help.

Oh yes please! as it was going to be a blistering hot day we decided to start early. They have about 7 hives and after giving the little fellas a quick puff of sleeping drought the lid was lifted and another quick puff and they were more than happy to let us see the glorious honey they have been busily making for the past couple of months. 

Puff

another wee puff 

There are 2  compartments each holding 8 trays in each hive and they were all full to the brim and weighed just over 2 kilos each. This hive will give roughly 16/18 kilos from the top 8.

Checking the bottom compartement of the hive and you can see it still has a way to go till full, but the bees are busy working on that.

 My neighbour Suz who at 81 has more energy than some people I know half her age

A happy Bee

You can see how full this one is

Scraping the wax off before spinning

The smell that was wafting up from the centrifuge whilst it was spinning was intoxicating, this then gets strained into yet another container to remove any wax before filling the jars.

Pot ready and labelled from last year

It was fun seeing the process and never knew it was so much hard work, the amount of honey that was dripping everywhere and so much cleaning up to do, but when you taste the honey you can totally understand their labour of love. I like that fact that the bees pop over to my garden to collect the nector and then I get to spread their honey on my toast. x