April 06, 2004

• A really good place to get fresh honey is at farmers markets. Local honey helps with allergies, ya know.
• that's right! and you can buy it from the honey man at the farmer's market!
• It's all bee poop, you know.
• barf, i was told. zzzzzzzzzzzzzhyaak!
• I had mead at a pub I worked at in England years ago. The stuff was vile. But I do love honey. In fact, I use it in place of cane sugar when I make bread for my pizza dough.
• nope, fes, THIS is bee poop. wouldn't want to spread that on my toast!
• y'know it's _almost_ cute. Not for toast though, definitely.
• I don't have to shop for honey. My wife's grandfather keeps bees. It's amazing how much a couple of hives can produce - he has 44 gallon drums full of the stuff.
• didja know honey is a natural antibiotic? stick it on a wound, and you shouldn't get an infection. probably the neosporin is better, but if you're stuck outside somewhere, honey works. it also never goes bad. thousand-plus year old honey recovered in intact amphorae from greek shipwrecks, heated (and water added if necessary to reconstitute), melts back into the golden delight it once was. perfectly edible. mmm. honey. damn now i want tea with honey. well, back to the coffee shop it is then...
• Mead: The choice of the SCA generation. (No warranty about quality of quantity of mead-related content express or implied.)
• Nothing like a honey spoon and lemon teat for a sore throat... but otherwise, it's a little too sweet for me. Ah, but maple syrup... aaaaahhh... pancakes... (where's that quick-mix box?)
• Oh crap. Lemon tea, that's it. Mmh, well, thinking it better...
• I don't wanna live without honey. Maple syrup is a very close second, Flagpole. When I was a kid, a wild hive formed inside the walls of our very old house and fresh honey dripped down through the lintel of my closet for a few summers. I had a pan to collect it, poured it into a little plastic bear and ate it all the time. It'll always remind me of summer. Unfortunately, here in the NE U.S. we have these mites that make wild hives very hard to find. It's rare to see a honeybee here anymore, what with the mites and even more the ubiquitous poisons the paranoid parents spray everywhere...
• umm, a little research would tell me that those mites are everywhere now...
• They're even in New Zealand. Thanks, Australia.
• I had mead at a renfaire a few years back, just a shotglassful (for $4!) and it was both delicious and potent. Wish I'd bought a bottle for home. I don't see Pablo Honey on that list, anywhere.
• I love honey. And the first time I tried mead, I fell in love. Better than brandy. But some types of New Zealand honey are really expensive, like Manuka honey. It can go for sixty to seventy dollars a bottle here. I spread honey on my bread with peanut butter for breakfast every morning. Seems to do wonders for my chronic sore throat and cough problems.
• Thanks, Australia. No wuckers, NZ. /victimologist
• Oh, SideDish, where have you been? Honey is, like, so last year. Salt is the latest foodie craze. Salt is the new honey. *gags*
• Jeez, Alnedra, I'll smuggle you some for half that.
• Well, some of the honey products are about half that price, but there's some NZ honey that is way up there in price which is supposed to contain some special nutrients or something. Heaven help me, I can't remember at all what the MacGuffin is.
• flagpole, kuujjuarapik - i second you on the maple syrup. my dad does the outdoor ed program for my hometown school system (on top of being an elementary school principal). 4th grade outdoor activity is syrup. he takes the kids out to the woods, they hang buckets on maples (and, being 4th graders, occasionally on an oak or elm). this year was disappointing, only 400 gallons of sap collected due to small class size and poor weather. that's enough to make a whopping 10 gallons of syrup (although some was lost to sap going bad prior to boiling as well - like i said, bad year). it is kind of fun though, as i always benefit from the leftovers. i don't know anybody else who has a gallon jug of pure maple syrup in their fridge. makes my pancakes happy. (local prices would make purchasing that amount somewhere around $50.) he also does cider with the 2nd graders. now, that's cool and all, but a jug of filtered cider looks an awful lot like a jug of pure maple syrup, and pure syrup is about as watery as cider. you don't want to pour yourself a big glass of cider and find out it's actually syrup after you've taken a big gulp of it. trust me.
• Frogs: Sooo...didya ever pour maple syrup on your pancakes, and then get roaring drunk?
• *kicks Wolof* That's wierd, Alnedra. Like tracicle, I'm starting to think getting into the manuka honey smuggling business sounds like a great way to retire. Heck, I even have a couple of manuka trees on the property. I could get a hive and make my own.
• I heard there is a kind of New Zealand honey that is suposed to be the best in the world - it's the flowers. It was the best I had ever tasted.
• Probably manuka honey, jb. This is what manuka flowers look like, if you're interested. (Warning: large files).
• Yes - I think that was it (I should have read the thread more carefully - but thank you for the pictures!)- It was very tasty.
• *kicks Wolof* *instantly falls asleep at familiar comforting sound of whingeing NZer*
• *emits high-pitched whining sound*
• Any more of that, Wolof, and I'm handing you over to the drop bears. *watches Australians in undignified scramble to find Australian connections to New Zealand film industry*
• Ever been to Bondi?
• ...bee poop or ...bee barf... Thought I posted this but it seems it didn't take.
• neat bees - but where does the wax come from?
• Thanks bees - I never knew that. I was wondering though - if we take the honey from the honey bees, why don't they starve?
• Or do they? Scary honey!
• ...but where does the wax come from? From worker bees -- who do all the work except procreation. Bee porno drawings here, for those curious about how the bees do it.
• During ejaculation, the male falls back and his endophallus is ripped out of his body and remains attached to the queen. . . . uh . . .
• ...oh yeah, like that's never happened to you, pete_best... oy...
• Bees are glad to see the flowers; without honey, how life sours! The queen, she flies but once before she dies and in the interim lays eggs and thinks of him ... and him .. and him ...
• I've always wanted to keep bees. I wonder if you need a permit?
• This [pdf file, sorry] might be helpful, Nostril.
• Workers wear their wings to shreds, and cool the hive, and make it thrive, they fetch all the nectar and they swallow it and place it into cells as time allows, while the queen lays eggs and the drones laze around devising rhymes to amuse the queen until the day comes for finally flyin', after which the drones are seldom seen.
• Aha! Thanks very much, beeswacky! You went to the trouble of looking up the bumf from me' own country, I appreciate it. I was gonna ring the council tomorrow morning, nudged by this thread, now you've saved me the trouble. /bow 'mazing thing this internets.
• bumblebee.org Nifty stuff.
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