The First Annual NYC Honey Festival - An Afternoon in Rockaway

So I pick up my most recent edition of Edible Queens and I see an ad for the First Annual New York City Honey Festival on September 17th.  What fun!  I love honey and it would be awesome to spend the day at Rockaway Beach and taste local honey.

I think a lot of people had the same idea we did.  We showed up at about 2:30pm and the place had almost run out of honey already.  Sad, but we did each get a small jar of local honey before the supplies were depleted.  We checked out the vendors which included the likes of NY Bee Keeping advocates and local farmers.  There was a pickle vendor (Horman's Best Pickles), a HOT honey vendor (Mike's Hot Honey), two honey based craft beers (Six Point Brewery) and screen print your own bee hive t-shirts.  There was also a tasting/ranking of your favorite honeys.

We ate at Ode to the Elephant (Thai food) and AND Coffee (the BEST Hot Chocolate I've had out in a while, though they were out of marshmallows) both located in the Rockaway Beach Club (aka the NY State Park pavilion on the boardwalk).

The weather was perfect, the location was beautiful, the festival was educational and fun but the only thing missing was Stella, my sister's pup.  She would have had a blast with all the sand, surf and bees.

These hard workers didn't stop to wave to the crowds.

NY State has approved bee keeping the the boroughs -
roof tops of Brooklyn, here they come!

This poor little guys just didn't want to let go!

Honey Extraction - scrapping the wax from the comb to
get that beautiful golden liquid from its caves

The difference between a dark, amber looking honey (late season)
and a pale, golden honey (mid summer).  You can see the light color
on the top of the light wood and the dark combs in the metal racks.

No rest for these busy bees...haha...get it?