So, we went to Hannibal last weekend to extract honey for the first time this year. Brooke pulled 28 frames from her hives here in Marshall and ended up with 8-10 gallons of honey. Her Dad had more like 70 frames, so it was a looooooooong day of extracting for them. The kids and I mostly hung out in the pool, so that was nice. 😉
Anyway, with so much honey, including some we and Brooke’s Dad had left from last Fall, the conversation moved toward “how do we offload it?” The kids sounded amenable to putting a table outside our house, so we figured we’d give that a try. Frankly, I didn’t expect more than a few people to stop, if that. We also figured the kids would get bored and want to come inside. The temperature was actually quite pleasant for August 1st, so it wasn’t nearly as hot as it could have been.
They stayed out there for 6 hours. 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. They sold through $212 of various products, including candles, last Fall’s honey, and the more recent batch from this Spring.
They also got $10 in tips. People just dropped by and gave them $2.
I went out for a 20 mile bike ride as they were getting started, and as they were set up relatively far from the house, Brooke wanted to be in earshot of them, so she did some stuff in the garden, and also started picking peaches. We ended up with 10 gallons of those, too!! They actually taste much better than they did last year, and they were good enough to just bite through the skin and eat right off the tree.
They’re getting toward the end of their cycle though, so there were quite a few on the ground already, and as we picked some of them from the tree, peaches typically fell. For some reason, the japanese beetles have been much more mild this year, so we didn’t have to fight off many of those, though we did spot a few as we were doing some picking.
Brooke even put 10 at a time into paper bags to have the kids sell for $2 a bag. We think they sold 8-10 bags of peaches, too!
By the end of the day, we were ready to actually eat some of them, so Brooke put them into a crisp and we enjoyed them that way. Deeeeeelicious. 🙂
All in all, we were very impressed with the kids. They were polite, they took turns coming in if they needed something like water or a snack, they didn’t complain about it… They seemed to have a lot of fun!
So much so, they earned a $55 table-top air hockey set. It should get here tomorrow. 🙂
