Rebirth in 1984, starting from beekeeping in the mountains

Chapter 9: Taking Honey and Improving Food
"so……"

"There's actually a beehive in Mashiling!"

"Hongan, you can actually find the beehive hidden in the cracks of the rocks by luring the bees?"

“All this honey is obtained by digging out beehives!”

……

"You asked me to sew a bamboo hat so that I could make a bee hat to protect myself from bee stings!"

……

After closing the door.

After the excitement, Lan Wenxiu quickly became a curious baby.

Fang Hongan did not hide it and briefly introduced the whole process of how he used honey water to lure bees, how he tracked the bees' paths to find the hive, and finally how he dug up the hive and took out the honey.

Of course, Fang Hongan deliberately made it sound like everything went smoothly, and also concealed details such as scratches and bee stings.

As for why he suddenly understood all this, he made an excuse that it was because he met an experienced beekeeper who taught him when he went to town yesterday!
Reasonable.

Lan Wenxiu didn't doubt it much.

After sighing for a while, they were soon immersed in the joy of the carnival.

Fang Hongan looked at his wife in front of him and saw the smile on her face as bright as a flower. He suddenly felt an indescribable sense of satisfaction in his heart.

This kind of satisfaction was something I had never experienced in the forty years of wasted time in my previous life.

"very nice!"

Fang Hongan sighed sincerely, then took out the clean gauze and jar he had prepared earlier, ready to extract the honey from the honeycombs.

In the absence of a honey shaker, the most convenient method Fang Hongan could think of was to squeeze the honey manually.

Gauze is used to filter out impurities.

However, there is still some preparation work to be done before this.

Fang Hongan untied the tie of the film bag, spread it out on the square table, found a pair of chopsticks, and began to pick out the debris one by one!

These honeycombs are dug out from the ground and taken out by hand, so they are inevitably mixed with dirt, dead branches and leaves!

Of course, these are not the most common ones.

But... the corpse of a bee!

When the honeycombs are taken out, most of the bees are frightened and fly away.

But there are some solid "guards" that are packed in along with the honeycomb.

Once the opening of the film bag is punctured, the bees will be suffocated to death inside in a short time.

Before extracting honey, the dead bees must be removed.

Seeing that the project was quite large, Lan Wenxiu also took chopsticks and came over to help.

When she caught those dead bees, she suddenly remembered something.

He put down his chopsticks silently, reached out his hand and rolled up Fang Hongan's sleeves without saying a word.

After seeing that Fang Hongan's arms were full of sting wounds, her eyes suddenly misted over!
Seeing this, Fang Hongan quickly said softly: "It's just like an ant bite, it doesn't hurt! It's not poisonous, and the lumps will disappear after a good night's sleep!"

"Ok!"

"Ok!"

Lan Wenxiu twitched her body a few times and responded solemnly. She was strong enough not to cry. After helping Fang Hongan pick up the sundries, she turned back to the inner room and took out the old mosquito net that she had tidied up before...

This is Fang Hongan.

After cleaning up the debris, Fang Hongan took out a knife from the fire room. The honeycomb of the beehive is composed of hexagonal cells, but these cells are not all honey. In addition to the honey cells that store nectar, there are also pollen cells that store pollen, and ovaries for breeding bee larvae.

A complete honeycomb usually has three areas: honey comb, pollen comb and brood comb. When the swarming season comes, some honeycombs will also have royal cells for breeding new queen bees.

Because there is honey only in the cells in the honeycomb area, before you can squeeze the honey, you have to disassemble the honeycombs and cut out the honey combs separately.

Honey combs are usually concentrated at the top of the honeycomb and can be easily distinguished with the naked eye. Capped honey cells will have caps, and although water honey has no caps, the honey in the cells can be directly seen.

May in Tianmang Mountain is one of the seasons when flowers are in full bloom and nectar sources are most abundant.

Judging from the honey production cycle, it is the peak production period of spring honey.

The nest that Fang Hongan dug this time not only had a lot of honeycombs, but the area on the honeycombs was also quite exaggerated. Except for the last two old honeycombs collected, the proportion was more than 40%.

The first two pieces picked were pure honey combs.

Moreover, almost all the honey on the honey combs is high-quality capped honey.

It can be predicted that even if the original squeezing method is used, the honey yield will be quite high.

Fang Hongan used a knife to cut out the honey combs piece by piece, and collected the cut pollen combs and brood combs in a basin. Although there was no honey in this part, Fang Hongan kept it for an important purpose.

Lan Wenxiu watched from the side with her bright eyes, ready to lend a hand at any time.

After waiting for a while, he found that Fang Hongan was very skilled and did not need any help from him. After learning from him quietly, he thought that Fang Hongan had not had lunch yet, so he immediately went back to the cooking room to prepare lunch.

Fang Hongan quickly cut out all the honey combs, took a basin of water, washed his hands with soapy water, and then rinsed them with clean water.

After completing this preparation, put clean white gauze in the jar to cover it, pick up a piece of honeycomb with your hand, and start squeezing it.

There are no disposable gloves these days, so you can only operate with your bare hands. But after all, it is something you eat, so hygiene must still be paid attention to.

With both hands, I rub the honeycomb filled with honey. The cells are squeezed and broken, and the attractive amber honey flows out immediately, rolling and falling into the jar covered with gauze below.

The process is not only pleasing to the eye, but also quite stress-relieving.

The honeycombs of spring honey are the fullest. Each honeycomb, although seemingly small, can squeeze out unexpectedly much honey.

In a short while, the honey in the jar had filled half of the jar.

Fang Hongan sped up and squeezed the remaining honeycombs one by one. Then he took a piece of gauze, put the remaining honeycomb residue from the first squeezing into the gauze, rolled up the gauze, and started the second squeezing.

There will inevitably be some residue when squeezing with hands. When squeezing for the second time, a lot of honey is squeezed out of the gauze.

After two squeezes, the amber in the jar had reached the neck and was almost filling the entire jar.

However, this is not the final harvest. When squeezing manually, it is inevitable that a lot of honeycomb residue mixed with honey will fall into the jar, so it has to be filtered next.

Fang Hongan gathered the gauze covering the edge of the altar with his hands and tied a knot. He then took the hook that he had prepared in advance, tied the hook rope to the crossbar, lifted the gauze bag and hung the knotted part firmly on the hook.

The gauze is three layers long. After it is hung up, honey slowly seeps out from the small holes on the gauze. Because it is very sticky, it will not flow down directly, but gather at the bottom and turn into a clear yellow line that slowly flows into the jar.

The speed is very slow, but Fang Hongan is not in a hurry. For filtering something like this, the slower the better!

When Fang Hongan turned around, his wife Lan Wenxiu was already waiting by the side.

On the table next to them was a steaming lunch.

Two bowls of rice mixed with shredded sweet potatoes, a bowl of pickles, a bowl of green vegetables, and the last bowl contained two pheasant eggs.

When Fang Hongan washed his hands and walked over, Lan Wenxiu had already peeled a pheasant egg and put it in Fang Hongan's bowl.

Fang Hongan was about to say something when Lan Wenxiu pointed at the eggs in her bowl, blinking her big eyes with a determined look.

Fang Hongan understood what his wife meant. Seeing her resolute attitude, he stopped being pretentious, grinned, and sat down under Lan Wenxiu's expectant gaze.

Pheasant eggs are just the beginning. From now on, he will completely improve the family’s food so that Lan Wenxiu can eat pheasant eggs and even... meat every day!

　During the new book period, there will be two updates every day, tentatively at 8:00 and 18:00, because we need to arrange the recommendation. The explosive update will be released after the book is put on the shelves.
　　

(End of this chapter)