Honey tasting activity

It's always good to talk about bees! We had a whole unit on them once (Pinterest board for that here) and maybe will again sometime—there's lots to learn! But this was just part of our Flower Unit. Our honey-tasting activity was a favorite for everyone this time. We ordered a bunch of different honeys from Smiley Honey (they have a good selection of sampler sets here, or you can choose your own) and after tasting them all, enjoyed eating them on our toast for a long time afterwards (though not as long as you'd HOPE—it went fast!).

They were all good, but some favorites for their unique taste were the sourwood honey, the coriander honey, and the orange honey. But really, we liked them all! I like to order large bottles of the tupelo honey because it doesn't crystallize, or at least not very fast.

They can have very different colors as well as flavors!

We tasted each kind plain first—I went around and drizzled some into each child's spoon. The we got out the bread and had our favorites on that.

The little boys were glad to participate in this with us. Yum!

Honey Panna Cotta with Spun Sugar Garnish

This Honey Panna Cotta we had for our Honeybee Celebration was simply amazing. I can't find words adequate to describe how smooth it was! A cross between Greek Yogurt (which it contains) and Frozen Custard, maybe. And the honey gelatin on top is so mild and translucent---it looks beautiful and tastes just like honey and sunshine. We loved it. And it's easy enough to make that the older children did it all themselves, with me calling out instructions as I nursed Marigold on the couch.

We garnished with what this video, linked in the original recipe, calls "spun sugar" (and he's French, so he must be correct). I would have called it caramelized sugar to distinguish it from something like cotton candy. Anyway, it is easy to make. Just sugar melted with water. And don't be too alarmed that the sugar might suddenly crystallize. (Sometimes it does---it is actually really cool. It looks like this:

and it happens in the blink of an eye, if there's a sugar crystal or some other impurity on your spoon or on the sides of your pan. That's why the video says not to stir after the sugar liquifies.)

Anyway, if it does crystallize, it's easy to fix---just reheat it slowly and it will turn into a liquid again. Then you can proceed as directed to drizzle the caramel onto parchment in pretty patterns. This was something I had to help with, as it was a bit difficult for the boys to do.

Once this hardens, you can break it apart and use it for garnish! So elegant.

The Panna Cotta itself is extremely simple. There are only a few ingredients, so make sure you use only the highest . . . no, just kidding. Use whatever you want.

Honey Panna Cotta

1/4 cup milk
2 ¼ tsp. (1 envelope) unflavored gelatin
2 cups heavy cream
1 tsp. vanilla (or a vanilla bean, if you have it)
1/3 cup honey
1/3 cup sugar
2 tsp. lemon juice
2 cups plain Greek yogurt

For the Honey Gelatin:
1 tsp. unflavored gelatin
2 T water
1/3 cup honey
1 cup water

Mix the gelatin with the milk in a small bowl. Set aside.

Meanwhile, mix the cream, vanilla, honey and sugar in a medium pan and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and let cool slightly. Add the gelatin-milk mixture to the pan and stir until completely dissolved. Add the lemon juice and stir. Whisk in the Greek yogurt. 

Pour the mixture into individual glasses, or into one large glass bowl. (I think individual servings are more elegant, but we doubled this recipe, so we did some in glasses and the rest in a big bowl.) Make sure to leave about 1/2 inch of space for the gelatin at the top of the glass. Chill at least 3 hours in the refrigerator.

To make the gelatin, combine 2 tablespoons of water and the 1 tsp of gelatin in a small bowl and stir. Set aside for 5 minutes.  Meanwhile, combine the one cup of water with the 1/3 cup of honey in a pan and bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat. Add the gelatin mixture to it and stir until gelatin powder is completely dissolved.

Pour the gelatin mixture over the panna cotta, dividing it evenly among the glasses. Chill until set, at least one hour. Garnish with spun sugar.

Field Trip to Kevin's Bees

We are super lucky, because one of Sam's coworkers keeps bees, and he said we could come visit his hives! We were SO excited, and then there was a lot of anticipation because this field trip was put off a couple times---once for a rainstorm, and once for sickness. So by the time we actually got to the bees, we'd been waiting a couple weeks!

Kevin and his wife Heather are the nicest beekeepers ever. They told us lots of interesting things about bees and beekeeping, and then best of all, they let the older boys suit up in a beekeeper's suit and help check inside the hives!! It was pretty much the coolest thing they have ever done.

Before we opened up the hives, we all went over to have a closer look. We stayed to the side, since bees don't like people blocking the path to their hive's entrance.

We could see the Guard Bees standing faithfully at their posts

Kevin demonstrated how to use the smoker, and showed us how to pump slowly so the smoke wouldn't be too hot.

Abe suited up first. We had to use some twine to hold up his pants! :) We hadn't come prepared with long pants because we didn't know we'd get to get so close to the bees!

Abe holding the smoker and letting smoke out to calm the bees

Kevin pulled off the supers one by one to check the honey inside.

He showed us the bees on their comb, and the wax caps covering the honey cells. The older boys also got to see brood cells and a few drones.

Queen cells on the side of the frames

Some comb Kevin pulled off the edge of one of the frames

Seb helps check the other hive

Another beautiful piece of comb

An unfortunate end (or perhaps you could say, the perfect end) to this awesome day was when Daisy and then Junie both got stung! We stayed far away from the hives with them, but somehow they got stung anyway. Maybe it was the bright colors they wore (bees find white and neutrals more calming). But Daisy had been SO excited to wear her bee shirt and bee hair clip. The saddest thing was after she got stung (on the back of her neck), she was crying and saying, "But I thought the bees would LOVE me!" We finally convinced her that the bees DID love her; they just got so excited that one of them stung her accidentally. :)  I read that bees release a pheromone when they sting that other bees smell and think "danger"---so then they are more likely to sting too. I'm guessing that's why Junie got stung after Daisy did---the bees were excited by the first sting. Who knows.

Anyway, luckily we're all very resilient and don't have any allergies to bee stings (that we know of), so we rubbed some witch hazel on the girls' stings and they felt better within 10 minutes. By the time we got home, everyone was talking fondly about the bees and the "poor bees" that died when they stung the girls, and asking if we could go back and visit again soon. :)

I was excited when I brushed off Junie's sting site because I could see a bee's stinger fall into my hand (which I've never seen before). I thought this would be a better picture but I guess the stinger is just too tiny. Here is a better picture of a stinger, for your enjoyment.

Sebby and Malachi played beekeeper for the next several days :)

Honeybee Celebration

This was a fun celebration because there are so many recipes that use honey! We only chose a few to make, of the many recipes I had bookmarked to try. I also appreciated the way the boys used our paper honeycomb as a tablecloth.

The recipes we tried are:

Honey-sesame chicken (delicious!)

Honey salad dressing (pretty good, but I've had better)

Honey-drizzled flatbread--best eaten warm. I doubled the recipe but shouldn't have, because we had too much left over and it wasn't as good the next day.

Honey panna cotta--this was awesome---see separate post here

Honeyed hot cocoa (really interesting---it was almost a savory taste, hardly sweet at all. And very rich. I would make it again, in the right context---it was very unexpected.)

There are more ideas on my pinterest board.

We had fun making these jellybean bees, which we used as garnish on our plates and the food plates

What a delicious feast! Thank you, honeybees!

Crystallized Honey experiments

We learned about the crystallization process in honey, and factors that can influence crystallization. (For example, honeys with a higher fructose-to-glucose ratio do not crystallize as easily. Orange blossom honey is supposed to resist crystallization altogether. Heat can also influence if and when a honey crystallizes.)

We mixed honey with different amounts of water to see how fast it would crystallize in the fridge. We found the inspiration for our experiments here, here, and here.

We also heated some crystallized honey and watched how the process reverses and it becomes runny again. Very interesting!

Beehives, Polygons, and Comb Construction Project

Beehives and comb cells are some of the most amazing things! To discover how hexagons are one of the strongest shapes for building with, we made various polygons out of paper---but first we investigated something intriguing I read in this book. The author says: 

"Recently, it has been suggested that the hexagonal cells are an 'emergent property,' that is, at the right temperature . . . the hexagons form on their own. First the bees make cylindrical tubes around themselves and then the hexagonal angles form. Chemically, the beeswax transforms from an amorphous (or unorganized) state into a crystalline state."

To test this, we rolled some clay cylinders out, about pencil size.

We put them into a group and squeezed them slowly together.

You can see that they have (kind of) formed hexagons! If our cylinders were more precise, and our squeezing more uniform, I think it would have been even more obvious.

We also had a good close look at this abandoned wasp's nest we found outside.

Next, we made polygons out of thin strips of paper. We measured the paper strips and figured out how many inches we'd need each side to be for squares, triangles, pentagons, hexagons, and octagons. We each made a couple examples of each type of polygon. Then we joined polygons of the same type together to see how they fit. We put a little foam ball inside each cell to see which cells were the roomiest for holding larvae and pupae.

We discovered that hexagons provide the least wasted space and the most interior space, for the least amount of material needed (perimeter) to make them.

After that, we made comb cells with different colors of paper to represent their different functions. Honey cells were yellow, pollen cells were orange, and brood cells were pink. We arranged these cells in their relative places in the hive (see page 32-33 of this packet for an example).

It was fun and oddly satisfying to make hexagon after hexagon and then tape them together. We would have kept going for longer if we hadn't gotten hungry for lunch.

We hung our finished comb up in a doorway. It got a little stretched out, but we didn't mind.

This is a queen cell hanging off the bottom. With a queen emerging from it.

 We had so much fun with our big beehive that we made smaller ones too. These were made with half-size and half-width strips of paper. We put them on top of white paper so we could draw what each kind of cell was holding inside. Here is Malachi's beehive with honey cells, pollen cells, and brood cells. I love it!