ODD'S & END'S CATCH UP

HAPPY 73rd BIRTHDAY to dearest friend, Don. He is 3 months and 4 days older than I and I never let him forget it!!!!

Don & Barbara. Precious friends of 35 years.

More dear friends, Jack & Mary, who have been friends for over 12 years now.

There was another couple, Ron & Dody, who we've know 5 years. I did take a picture of them but it didn't turn out well and Dody would kill me if I put it on this blog!!!!

Mickey & I with strain and sorrow written all over our faces as we had just spent the day, from 9:30 to 5:30, with our beloved daughter, Suzette, in the hospital and learned that she has lung cancer. It was good to be able to spend the evening with wonderful, caring, & PRAYING friends at such a time.

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KING'S KITCHEN - We served 45 shut-ins this past Tuesday. This ministry continues to be blessed in so many ways, the necessary contributions and the support of the Church Body.

One recent blessing : This young mother of 5 children under 6 years old, and one a newborn of 3 months, who asked if she could come help cook and bring her 2 little girls to help so they could begin learning about doing for others.

You bet!!! Here she is, showing them what to do in placing the tortillas in the pan.

Here is a better picture of these two whose names are Faith & Hope and the newest baby is Charity!!! I love that....don't you? Also shown in this picture is one of our cooks who has been involved since we began in February, Tammy, with one of her daughters, the red head, and a neighbor friend, who also attends CAG in the glasses. Mickey and Tammy's husband are watching.

More blessings and involvement from the Church Body: The Adult Single's class is making hand-crafted Christmas Cards for each shut-in we deliver to & The Girls Missionette's group is going to be baking Christmas cookies for each. They wanted them to have some home made cookies to be able to share with any guests they might have visit them during the Christmas holiday.

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HONEY: Mickey was able to harvest a few more frames of honey from his "girls" (bee's!). This is the first time we have done quarts with honey comb and also got these 1/2 & 1/4 pints to give as gifts. Mickey's bee's have done a bang up job this summer!!!!

HONEY HYDRATE DRINK

Ever since Mickey ended up in the hospital a couple of months ago from dehydration we have been extra careful about him getting enough fluid to drink.

We have been purchasing Pedia*lite & Gat*or*aide which can get a might costly.

I was delighted when looking up some honey recipes last week after he harvested the Spring Honey flow and I found this hydrate drink made with honey!!! It is so delicious I wanted to share it with everyone.

Honey Hydrate Drink

1/2 cup honey

1/2 teaspoon lite salt

2 cups orange juice

5 1/2 cups lukewarm water

Combine - Stir until honey is dissolved & refrigerate.

You can see I am bottling it up in the empty gator*aide bottles we had.

Delicious, convenient and money saving.

Spring Honey Flow

This is the 3rd flow of honey that Mickey has harvested since becoming a bee keeper. One last year, one in mid-may and now the first of the Spring Honey Flow.

The first dozen bottles and caps all ready.

The honey in the bucket after being extracted and filtered once.

Mickey filters his honey two additional times before bottling it.

16 pints of pure, wonderful honey in the bottles.

The finished product!!!!!!

Pure, edible honey comb!!!!!

This post can't be closed off without also reporting that Mickey was attacked by his bee's prior to this harvesting and was stung TEN times. As one of my blog/fb friends, Kathy, said, "It just makes the honey taste sweeter."

I love it that honey is one of the foods mentioned so much in Scripture!!!

Thank you Jesus and thank you bees.

EXPANDING THE BEE'S

We are learning that bee keeping can be very interesting!!!

A couple of weeks ago Mickey got a phone call saying a man had a swarm of bees on a wheelbarrow that he wanted someone to come and get because they had attacked the ranchers dog.

When Mickey arrived this is what he found. Now us not being either farmers or ranchers this was not exactly what he was expecting the wheelbarrow to look like!!!

The swarm is lodged between the wheel and the fender on this red side.

Here is an enlarged view. Usually the swarm can be captured by shaking the object they are clinging to but in this case, because of the way they were lodged between the wheel & fender, the only way to remove them was to reach in and push them out with your hand. Of course he was suited up with gloves & veil.

After safety placing the bees in the nuke (a smaller bee hive with only 5 frames in it) and removing his gloves & veil he was stung once on the chin and another bee flew into his ear, but thankfully did not sting Mickey and he was able to get it out.

SO... with a new swarm of bees Mickey has to build 4 medium supers.

Each super contains 8 of these frames. This is to make room for extractable honey.

Mickey's original bee hive he purchased in 2008 was expanded to 2 hives in 2009 and is now expanded to 4 hives. His intention is to only maintain 4 hives from this point forward.

1st HONEY HARVEST - 2010

Have you ever noticed it seems like you have either nothing to post about or so very much that you can't seem to get it all done? Well, I'm in the trying to get it done mode at the moment. Which in short means life around our place is very busy and with this post I'm happy to say productive.

Here is Mickey, out in the garage, with his honey extractor. This picture shows him scraping off (or decapping) the comb from one of the honey frames which will be placed in the extractor. Then he works hard manually cranking the extrator and that spins the honey from the frame. You can see the spout with the bucket under it to the left. The honey comes out of that and through a large sieve, which you cannot see, in the top of the bucket. The results below is pure, rich honey.

The bottled production. We got 18 pints and 4 -1/2 pints from this first extraction.




Here's my "honey" as he looks over the jars of honey we have just filled from this first production for this year.





The luscious bottled and capped pure honey from Mickey's bees - who he calls "his girls"!!!! Yes, it's as delicious as it looks.

These results are pure satisfaction!!!!

and

OH - SO TASTY

SHOW & TELL #24 - Cooking with Honey

It's Show & Tell Friday again. Time to drop over to Kelli's blog and enter your show & tell on Mr. Linky and then visit the various blogs to see all the interesting things shown to show.

I posted here about Honey extraction and showed these lovely jars of fresh honey. When Mickey first began this new venture of becoming a bee keeper I told him I would have nothing to do with the bees & hives, but that once we had honey I would learn about cooking with it. True to my word, here are my first honey cookies.

Here is a closer look and the recipe.

Crispy Oatmeal Cookies

1 cup flour (I used 1/2 white & 1/2 whole wheat)

1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats

1 1/4 cut walnuts, chopped

1/2 cup sweetened coconut, flaked

1/2 cup raisins (I used golden raisins)

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 Tablespoons boiling water

1/2 cup butter

3 Tablespoons HONEY

Preheat over to 325 degrees.

In a large bowl combine the first 6 ingredients

In a separate bowl stir together baking soda and boiling water. Set aside.

In a saucepan melt butter with honey over low heat. Remove pan from heat and mix in the baking soda mixture.

Pour into dry mixture, stirring until well blended. Form the batter into 1-inch balls and arrange on a baking sheet. Press the balls into disks about 1 1/2 to 2-inches in diameter.

Bake in middle of oven until edges are golden, about 12-14 minutes.

Yield: 30 cookies (approximately).

They turned out very rich and very delicious!!!!!

Original recipe from Golden Blossom Honey

MY "HONEY" & HONEY EXTRACTION

As many of you know, Mickey, became a Bee Keeper in May of this year. Go here to read about his getting & setting up his hives.

He has been blessed on this journey by Ronnie an experienced bee keeper. After Mickey got his hive all set up he was having trouble locating bees. Then he found out that two gentlemen in our church were experienced bee keepers. Mickey was able to buy his first bees from Ronnie and Ronnie has been mentoring him along this process. The other gentlemen, John, has also been a great help and is a member of the board of the local Bee Association.



Ronnie was ready to extract honey from some of his hives so Friday Mickey went with him to help and learn. They pulled 38 frames from 4 of Ronnie's hives. They brought them to Mickey's little barn for overnight because they were both exhausted.

This is Mickey after pulling all the frames on this hot summer day and finally home & relaxing with his cup of coffee.

Saturday morning we worked at the Church in our Angel Food Ministry. After lunch he went to pick up Ronnie and the fun began!!!

Here are Mickey & Ronnie with the stainless steel extractor. It will hold two frames of honey at a time. Mickey is working the crank. It works by centrifugal force. They put the 2 frames in one direction and crank until no more honey is coming out the spigot, then they turn the frames in the other direction and begin cranking again. You can barely see it in my picture but the spout at the bottom is where the honey comes out into the container they are using. Ronnie's job is decapping the comb. Decapping is cutting the top off the cells where the bee's have stored the honey in the honey comb and capped it off with a thin layer of wax.

This extractor belongs to our friend John who is graciously letting both Ronnie and Mickey borrow it to use for this big job. These babies cost from $400 up so if it weren't for a wonderful Christian friend Mickey & I would be doing it "the old fashioned way", whatever THAT is!!.

This is the tray where the decapping is done. The frame is set on the crossbar and the knife you see is slide up the frame from bottom to top cutting the caps. Then the frame is turned around and the other side is decapped. This is done before the frames are placed into the stainless extractor. What you see accumulating here is the honey comb caps which can be cleaned and made into wax products.

A closed look at the cuttings of honey comb and the knife.

Ronnie ended up with two 5 gallon pails of unstrained honey. He also filled up one of my ice cream buckets (I told you I use these for everything!) for Mickey's helping him with this big job.

This is our portion of the honey after our first straining through a sieve.

This is the honey after the second straining. We used a new woman's ankle hose for this straining!!!! A tip we got from the bee club meetings.

Here I am pouring the strained honey into the various little jars I have been saving since Mickey got his hives.

Here's my tired extractor cranking honey extractor "honey" with all his jars of this wonderful fresh honey.

A close-up of the lovely honey.



Savoring a piece of toast with butter and FRESH honey with his coffee AND resting his tired feet and body.

Oh, one part I almost forgot.......after doing all the extracting Mickey decided he wanted to check his hives and see how close they were to being ready. He was not bit one time during all of the processing of Ronnie's honey, but when he took off the top of his hive to look his bee's swarmed him and he was bitten 8, yes EIGHT, times before he could get away. They cannot figure out why. Maybe they didn't like him bringing in those OTHER bees!!!!


The extractor after Mickey had cleaned it all up. Ready to go back into the barn and wait for our honey to be ready. Should be soon.

"Pleasant words are as an honeycomb, sweet to the soul, and health to the bones."

Proverbs 16:24

This has nothing to do with honey but wanted to show you 3 pears and okra we were blessed with. Actually we were given 4 times this amount of okra but we are not big okra eaters so we shared amounts like this with three of our neighbors. There was also a yellow squash but we ate it before I got the picture taken :o)