Honey...

I was selling my soaps at Granite Farms again this morning and I purchased from my friendly farmer, this 3 lb. jar of golden honey. As soon as I got home I dipped in a spoon and had a spoonful of sweet, smooth, deliciousness.

I have many plans for this honey. Not only will I be drizzling it on my morning toast, but I have a new recipe I have been waiting to make. A super healthy bread using honey, sunflower and flax seeds.

What I find most exciting is that I will be making a batch of honey soap. Honey soap is on the list of many new specialty soaps I am in the process of producing for you.

Here are some neat honey facts, from Honey.com ~

• To produce 1 lb. of honey, a honey bee must tap two million flowers.
• On average, each person eats 1.31 lbs. honey per year.
• A worker bee visits about 50-100 flowers during each trip.
• There are an estimated 211,600 beekeepers in the United States.

Wow! that means honey bees visited about 6 million flowers to make my 3 lbs. of honey. That is alot of flying around for those little bees.

My father used to keep bees and I had the privilege of seeing the whole process from start to finish. Ordering bees by mail and then building the hive. Smoking the bees to collect the screens full of dripping fresh honey. My dad even built the extractor himself to spin those full frames clean of honey. He has since put his hive equipment away, I'm not sure what had happened to those bees. I do know that he still has much of the hive equipment and my husband and I are interested in perhaps starting are own hive so we can enjoy our own fresh local honey.

Spring is coming...time to plan.