I love to enter my honey in competitions. Challenges are my bread and butter.
See you don't just put your honey in a mason jar and take it to the fair. There are rules and protocols you need to follow in order to place.
Before you can even think about entering honey in August, you need to start preparing in June when honey supers go on the beehives in our state of Colorado.
I wanted to enter a pristine frame of honey! So every time I would go out to do a hive inspections, I would comb over frames of honey looking for what could be the best frame for the show. A show frame can not have a single open cell of nectar. It must be uniform with no traffic staining or wet capping's.
In July my husband and I pulled the first round of honey supers off of the hives to start prepping for the honey competition. As we went through 100 frames, we found 3 that could possible be candidate for perfection. Those three frames are set aside in a protective container to choose from later. After looking at each frames with magnifying glass, one was prefect and went into the frame holding box for show entry. The box is kept in a safe cool and low light area until show entry.
One bump can smash capping's in or cause the comb to fracture and start leaking out honey. None of that is ideal. So to safe keepings it goes.
Northern Colorado Beekeepers Associations helps hosts the honey Competition for the Larimer County Fair. Make sure to always follow the directions for the competition you are entering. Below is NCBA's
That frame of honey received a special award for Best Honey Exhibit- blue ribbon
The first honey harvest of the year produced a light Linden Honey. I have never had my bees produces such light colored honey before.
Best Honey Extracted Comb Honey (Chunk)
Comb Section blue ribbon first place
Extracted Honey took Overall Grand Champion
My beeswax took Overall Grand Champion
I was so excited to see how well my bees did.
It takes time and effort to make your entry's for the fair or any honey competition. I do this in large part to demonstrate to my children that I can invest time into a project like they do with 4H and school and be very proud of your hard work and accomplishments.
I hope that everyone had a fun and successful fair this year!
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