Something happened while I was out of station. A very close relative of mine, a cousin brother and someone whom I considered a loving little brother died when I was in the hills. I didn’t hear the news in time due to the lack of/poor network coverage. I heard it only the following day when I went to drop someone off. So I had to take some time off though I feel that I need more time off to get over everything which have happened so far.
Anyway back to topic, looking for pure honey is much harder and time consuming than I thought - first lesson (I know that I talk or rather type a lot but I’m going to keep it as short as possible though it may not work lol). Heck even looking for farmers who deal in only pure honey isn’t easy. For 100% certainty you have to be there and it takes a long time to harvest it and I cannot be everywhere just to get half a litre of honey so I did what I could. I also managed to find some villagers rearing wild bees giving honey. They are really small smaller than the ones which I’ve seen. They said this bees are rare and gave the best honey. I asked them to harvest some for me and got two bottles of 750ml each. For some reason they use only 750 ml rum bottles.
The journey:
As I said in one of my older posts I visited multiple surrounding villages and talked to a lot of people who we thought might have an idea or two availability of pure honey.
Below is one such journey I went to with one of my uncles. We started off at about 4:30 to 5am. My uncle said we will be late if we go any latter (i.e. 6 am or worse). This is how the early morning weather in the village looked. It was so damn cold omg. Lesson: always prepare for the worst weather!
This is the route to the hill which we climbed
Another picture of the surrounding area
After hours of walking we finally reached the foothills.
The bottom-right is a pic of a hollow tree trunk with a hive inside. My uncle blocked the hole by covering it with a lot of leaves while he chopped the lower area of the trunk.
Before and After. It was our not-good-luck as this particular hive was only recently made so it was still very white and had nothing yet. After this we covered the chopped trunk with some wood and bark. My uncle said this will be ready sometime in January next year.
This is yours truly. I wore: one shirt, high neck, sweater, hoodie, neck warmer, baraclava, muffler, two pants (internal warm and external windproof) and faux-leather gloves. Lesson: wear a slimmer but good quality jacket!
One of the honey bee hives from which we harvested the honey (it was delicious!)
A pic of another hive and larvae:
Just to show you guys how we filtered the honey this is me doing it. Filtering is good but a good amount of honey is lost using this traditional approach. Another lesson learned.
And for those interested this is how I packed the orders for other members (they have been shipped).
For the shipping costs, shipping a 900-950gm (total weight post-packing) to Mumbai by Speed Post costs approx 150rs. The biggest order (1L) took almost 300rs.
Please don’t ask me why the different coloration of the honey because I don’t know. I think it might be due to the filtration or the hive or honey itself. The honey is red/brown/light orange’ish. It appears darker in pic due to poor camera quality.
I took more pics but in someone else phone and I forgot to take them.
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