As I'd promised, straight after breakfast I started extracting my two supers of honey, beginning slightly tangentially by vacuuming the kitchen floor, as I didn't want to find any tabby fluff or ginger and white hairs floating in the buckets when I'd finished.
Amateur honey extraction is a fiddle, taking an amount of time and effort in no way reflected in the five pounds a jar that seems to be the most the public is happy to pay at the Tendring Show. You clean the floor before you start, spread newspaper over the kitchen table to catch any drips and smears of propolis, and fetch the supers. It's a door and windows shut job, because you don't want any passing bees to find you, or they'll be back presently with half the hive and you will be in big trouble. If you run an Aga through the summer months, as we do because otherwise we don't have anything to cook on, you're in for a hot morning.
When honey is ripe and ready, concentrated to a low enough level of moisture that it won't ferment in storage, the bees cover the comb with a wax capping. If you are an amateur like me you slice this off with a sharp serrated knife, one side of one frame at a time. And if you are an amateur, like me, you probably have a hand cranked centrifuge. Mine holds two frames at a time, so after slicing the cappings off four sides it's time to put them in the wire drum in the extractor. You try to match their weights, otherwise the extractor wobbles and starts to walk across the kitchen floor as you spin. Then you turn the handle like mad one way, hanging on to the body of the extractor with your knees if it doesn't want to stay put, and if you are me you turn the handle the other way for good measure, before taking the two frames out, turning them over so that the opposite side is facing outwards, and spin them again.
The extractor has got a tap in the bottom, so when the level of honey in the bottom starts to reach the level of the wire cage, you run off a bucketful. The bucket should be of food grade plastic, with a tightly fitting lid. I run the honey through a sieve as it goes into the bucket, to remove any fragments of wax, or more gruesomely bits of bee. Any remaining fine particles of wax will tend to float to the top over the next few days, and can be removed by laying a piece of cling film over the surface and taking it off again, the debris stuck to it in a fine layer of honey. You waste some honey that way, but achieve a better finish. And that's all the processing I bother with, unless it starts to solidify in storage, in which case I might heat it very gently until it becomes liquid again.
There is a lot of washing up, the board and knife and sieve and spoons and the plate you needed to put the spoons down on, and it is all very sticky. The metal basket unscrews from the body of the extractor. Both need to be cleaned, and both are too large to fit in a domestic sink. However careful you are there will be drips of honey on the work surfaces, the floor, and other places you hadn't thought of but will gradually reveal themselves over the next couple of days. You wash the metal basket in stages, getting one section of one face under the tap at a time. You wash the main body of the extractor, and put it upside down on the draining board, where it leaves no room for anything else.
There are the cappings to deal with. It is impossible to cut off the wax covering without some honey coming with it, however shallowly you try to angle the knife. If you put the capping to drain in a colander, preferably somewhere warm, a useful amount of honey will drip off them. You wouldn't jar it up and offer it for sale, but it is perfectly good for cooking. The simmer plate of the Aga is ideal for this job, only then of course you can't risk opening the door or window until you've dealt with the cappings, in case any bees smell them. And then you have to wash the colander, and the pan you stood it in while it dripped.
The commercial beekeepers are much more efficient. They have a bee proof room for starters, where they can leave the supers until they're ready to deal with them, instead of having to seal off a room of the house which basically commits you to getting on with the job at once. They have electric heated capping knives, and motorised extractors that hold many more than two frames at a time. They do not have to do the whole exercise while avoiding bumping into the kitchen table, and I imagine hygienic stainless steel easy to wipe surfaces and big commercial sinks of a size to hold anything they need to wash in them. I do not picture them having to wipe dribbles of honey off the front of the boiler while being careful not to reset it to a daft temperature by mistake.
I only actually had one spare empty honey bucket, and was obliged to decant the last bit from a 2011 batch into jars to free up a second bucket. I didn't aim to have a bucket of four year old honey hanging around, but found it hidden away behind other buckets and boxes, and while the flavour has lost its subtleties and I wouldn't serve it to spread on toast, it is still perfectly good for cooking. I've been using it in honey and sultana loaves, and they have tasted very nice. This latest extraction is a mid brown, medium if not dark in show terms (almost certainly not technically dark. Our honey judge says he never sees dark honey). It has the complex flavour of freshly extracted honey, but with a distinct overtone of toffee. I like it, and can imagine it would be very good in savoury recipes calling for Greek honey, but I'm not sure it will be widely popular. Prototypical, ideal, Ur honey isn't supposed to taste of toffee, and when in novels characters are said to have honey coloured skin we aren't meant to visualise flesh the colour of dilute marmite.
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