Did you know that it is illegal to re-use glass honey jars? Unless you are a beekeeper, you probably didn't. As somebody who grew up in the era of doorstep milk, delivered in glass bottles which were rinsed and put back out for the milkman to return to the dairy, I thought this was preposterous, and said so. The difference, according to one of the local professional beekeepers, is that milk bottles are made of a different grade of glass, intended for re-use, and that honey jars can chip too easily.
Now I would have thought that the solution to that problem was to apply a modicum of sense, not to mention marketing nous, and not re-use chipped or cracked jars. Undamaged jars still seem fine to me, as long as they have been through the dishwasher and are squeaky clean. But the law forbids it. I presume this applies only to honey for sale, not for your own personal consumption, since I have not yet heard of any law prohibiting the use of chipped or scratched drinking vessels in the home. Maybe there will be one soon, and the sanitary inspectors will come and confiscate our collection of elderly bistro glasses.
I assume that if second hand jars are outlawed for honey, they are equally illegal for jam. All that marmalade at WI markets and school fund raising fetes is being sold in unlawful packaging, although the perpetrators, consumers and authorities seem uniformly blind to the infringement. If anything, cracked jars are more dangerous when jam is involved than when it's only honey, since jam is sometimes bottled while still extremely hot, and the glass could break, whereas you should never heat honey too much. Overheating honey not merely spoils the flavour, but produces chemicals that are toxic to humans. I think they are only generated in small quantities, so a plot for a detective story in which a scheming wife poisons her husband by slipping teaspoonfuls of overheated honey into his food is not going to be a runner, but nonetheless there are laws about permitted levels.
I heated my honey and wax mixture by the less scientific method of leaving it overnight in a ceramic dish on the simmer plate of the Aga. A beekeeping friend said that as long as it was only heated to a temperature at which you could leave your hand on the heat source and not have to pull it away, that was not too hot, and while I am not sure where the Systems Administrator's food thermometer is or how to use it, I do have a fully functioning hand at the end of my arm. By this morning the honey was melted but the wax wasn't, which was the idea, so I ladled the gloop of wax and honey into the kitchen sieve over a basin and the honey dripped through, put the honey through a finer sieve to remove more of the small particles of wax, and jarred it up. In total I got three jars from the heated gloop, just over half a jar from the wax cappings that spent the night in a colander on the Aga dripping through into a bowl, and just under half a jar from scraping out the extractor. The drippings and scrapings aren't the clearest honey in the world, but taste very nice, and will certainly do for cooking. When you think how much work the bees have done to make even a teaspoon of honey, you don't want to waste it.
Then there was a phenomenal quantity of washing up, what with the extractor, and umpteen bowls, and plates, and the jam funnel used for filling the jars, and the sieves. And I had to wash the floor again. Next time you see local honey for sale at four or five pounds a jar, do not bristle with indignation that it is so expensive. Marvel at how cheap it is, given the work involved.
The kitchen got extremely hot while I was doing all this, but I had to shut the door to keep the cats out, and didn't dare open the window in case bees started turning up. I put the supers outside late yesterday evening, leaving them in the wheelbarrow in a corner where they wouldn't cause a nuisance. By the time I got up this morning they were thick with bees, scavenging out the last drops of honey that I didn't get. Some beekeepers put them back on the hive, but I'm afraid I was too idle to suit up, walk all the way to the other end of the meadow, and disturb the bees. They found them quickly enough anyway. By lunchtime the cloud of bees was diminishing, and this evening I'll stack them away back in the garage, sandwiched between layers of newspaper. There was a year when I naively left the wet supers just outside the front door, and the crowd of bees was so offputting that I ended up using the back door for the rest of the day. The cats didn't really fancy the cat door either. I now know not to do that.
Addendum We got the jaguar back from the garage. It turns out that if the headlight wipers on a car have failed, you can't merely remove them. The law since March 2013 states that if they were originally fitted to a vehicle, they must remain in place, and must work. This has caught people out who have modified their cars, and then found them failing the MoT because they no longer have their headlight wipers. In order to fix ours, the garage had to remove the front bumper, so it was not a small job. They didn't charge as much as they might have, so perhaps although they have despaired by now of ever selling the Systems Administrator a new one, they calculated that still a regular service customer was a customer in these hard times, and that if they didn't meet us halfway, the SA might start taking the jag to a non-specialist, who would not be so inconveniently knowledgeable about which models did and did not originally have headlight wipers.
Honey jars, headlight wipers. The trouble with having too many civil servants employed at the centre (as distinct from teachers, nurses, firemen and people on the front line delivering a useful service to society) is not just that we have to pay their wages. It is that they have to fill their days and justify their existences. Inventing stupid regulations is one way of doing it.
No comments:
Post a Comment