Honey and Cherries

June 19, 2009

I totally skipped a day.  Yesterday’s blog was more of what I did today than yesterday.  So today is Friday.  Hillary and I got our last gelato and noon.  Then we went home and had dinner together around 5:30.  Mamma mia, Hillary leaves this evening.  She’s taking a night train to Paris where she’ll meet up with her family and I am so sad to see her go. 

It’s going to be weird still being here in Italy for a couple weeks without her.  We’ve been packing the last few days and it’s really depressing  I helped Hillary get her stuff to fit in her bags and then I went with Rita to go drop her off at the train station.  It was so sad!  I miss my little tall friend. 

After we dropped Hillary I went with Rita to go buy some cat food for Topi.  Then when we got home she showed me the honey factory that they have in 

the back yard.  It’s rather big.  Luda was in there preparing honey for tomorrow’s market in town.  Luda is Rita’s son’s companion.  She’s from Russia.  Anyway, she was super nice and showed me the different rooms where they prepare the honey.  The process begins upstairs.  After they gather all of the board things where the bees make the honey from the bee hives they bring them to the top floor of the factory. 

Then they use this little tool to pick the top layer of wax off the board where all the honey is left. 

Then they put the board in this spinner thing and spin it around until all the honey comes out.  Then the honey goes down this tube that goes down through the bottom of the floor into the room downstairs.  It drips into buckets and then the buckets are emptied into big tubs.  The tubs have a type of faucet at the bottom and that’s how they fill up the jars.  Luda grabbed a jar and filled one up for me and then handed it over to me as a gift.  When the honey comes out of the faucet it’s surprisingly clear and colorless.  She said that that’s because they do everything by hand so the honey is more natural and uncontaminated by metals from extra machinery.  After this they either add flavors and fruits to the honey or they just leave it plain.  Luda puts labels that she designed on the jars and gets them ready to sell.  Rita’s husband and son (Alvaro and Stefano) are quite famous here for their awesome honey and they have a pretty good business.  It’s called Apicultura Franchi.  Franchi is Alvaro’s last name and the word for ‘bees’ is ‘api’.  The also make scented candles from the bees wax.  They design the wax into little animals or flowers. After this Rita let me go up and pick some cherries out of her tree.  She has a latter that’s always there so I climbed it and helped myself to as many cherries as I wanted.  The cherries were this amazingly bright red color and they were really yummy. 

After all this I packed.  And it was lonely without Hillary.  My train leaves tomorrow, SATURDAY at 1:40.