The story of the busy bee and the wild herbs "honey" 🐝

Time flies by so fast! My post about these wild herbs I gathered for tea and food is 21 days old now. I am referring to this: Let's go wild for FruitsAndVeggiesMonday 🌿🌱🍃🌿 and this: Pasta with asparagus and wild herbs pesto. I had planned to let my next article on this subject follow much sooner ... but well, 🤷🏼‍♀️ as I said befor: time flew fast ...

... and so did I!! I flew around fast and was a busy bee and made myself some delicious wild flowers honey! 🍯 

Everytime I see all these beautiful wild flowers, for example a shiny golden field of blooming dandelions or when I smell the irresistible fragrance of elderberry flowers or a blooming linden I feel the urgent need to capture these precious aromas. I wondered if it would be possible to make something tasting very close to blossom honey without robbing the real bees. 😜

I was almost too late for the dandelion blooming and had to cycle around for a while to find myself a shady cooler meadow with the last dandelion flowers.

Another wild flower caught my attention because I found it blooming very close to the other place: the tiny but beautifully deep blue flower of the ground ivy. The ground ivy is a very insignificant plant. It hides close to the ground - probably that's why this name - but while blooming it erects its stems up as high as it can reach and presents its clusters of funnel shaped bluish flowers to attract bees. And here I was ... 😉

I collected a small bag of each sort of flowers and cycled home to my beehive. 

I think I should mention these typical small black bugs that seem to love the dandelion flowers so much, they live in them in hordes. I took every single flower and blew carefully in it. The bugs didn't like this at all and run and tried to escape quickly. No dead bugs in my honey!

To prepare the ground ivy for the honey making process was easy. I just had to wash them once.

The dandelion flowers took a bit more effort. One can use them in whole but I recommend to remove most of the green parts. Otherwise the honey could turn bitter. As you can imagine, this took a while ...

The next step is to put the blooms/plants in a pot, cover them with cold water, let it rest for two hours, heat it until boiling and let it cool down slowly on the switched off cooking plates and rest over night. Next day I strained the liquids through a sieve and a second time through a coffee filter.

In two not too small bots I mixed both sorts of liquids with 500g of sugar. I used half organic raw cane sugar and half organic whole cane sugar. I hoped this mixture would give my honey a beautiful dark color and a rich creamy taste.

Set the pots back on the cooking plates and bring to boil. Stay there and keep an eye on the pots. The mixture boils over easily and very very quickly. Don't go away. When cooking reduce the heat and let the mixture simmer for about one hour on medium to low heat.

After one hour you can try if the texture of the "honey" is right. Drop a little bit on a small plate and let it cool down. It's ready when the texture of the liquid is similar to honey. If not continue simmering for a while. I took a sample every ten minutes ...

Fill the honey in sterilized glases. Label it. Done! 🐝

I used these "honeys" on bread or buns or for pancakes. Actually both honeys taste differently a little bit. Becaus I took the effort to remove the bitter parts of the dandelion, the dandelion tastes sweet and flowery. The ground ivy tastes more tard, sweet-tard of course, more like a forest honey. I like them both and I am really happy with the results. I still have plans for elderberry and linden honey too. Cross your fingers for me because it's late again. It was so warm and summer like in the last couple of weeks - the blossoms came out so quickly.

By the way - my labels call the stuff "Ohnig". That's a pun by connecting the german words ohne (without) and Honig (honey).

The article is my contribution to wonderful Lena's #fruitsandveggiesmonday. The original post can be found here: STEEMIT FRUITS AND VEGGIES MONDAY COMPETITION 40th week ANNIVERSARY🍒 🍌🍑🌿🍍🍓🍇.

P.S. I know, too much sugar is not healthy but a little bit of it makes the life sweater. ☀️

P.P.S. The german word 'Pusteblume' describes the fluffy seed condition of the dandelion flower.