Ligurian Honey!

One of the things I failed to mention about our trip to Kangaroo Island in South Australia, was the discovery of the rare Ligurian honey.

Long story short. Liguria is the coastal region of north west Italy, and is famous for a type of bee that would produce impressive honey. In the early 1800's the Ligurian bee was introduced to Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Since it is an island about an hour off of the main land, it was too far for local bees to travel too. Over time the Ligurian bee in Liguria began to mix with other strains of bee's and currently no longer exist in Liguria.

The Kangaroo Island bee population is believed to represent the last remaining pure stock of this Italian bee race found anywhere in the world. The Australian government decided to name Kangaroo Island a bee sanctuary, and it is now the oldest bee sanctuary in the world. 

Because this was unique to Kangaroo Island we decided to visit the honey fields and little tourist shop where they sell honey. There was not much to see, but I did learn quite a bit and I got to sample the different kinds of honey, which I found quite fascinating!

I learned, the liguria bee will only travel about 10 minutes from its hive. They place the hives near different plants on Kangaroo Island and depending on what the hive is near, the necture of that plant will affect the flavour of the honey the bee's produce.  For instance, one flavour of honey was produced from the necture of a gumtree or eucalyptus leaves, another had peppermint bark. Another batch was made of wild flowers, specifically: banksia, hakea, melaleucas and flowering annuals, all local to Australia.  The colour of the honey, texture and flavour would all be unique from the others. 

As a child, I remember watching Winnie-the-Pooh and thinking, I would LOVE to eat honey like Pooh-bear!  However, whenever I would eat honey, I would find it overwhelmingly sweet. Currently,  I use honey often as a sweetner, since I am stearing clear of refined sugars but, it's still not something I would fill a spoon up with and eat straight...

until NOW!

Stan and I bought some tubs of honey, and when we got home from our holiday, Mary, Thomas and I were dipping spoons into the tub of honey we bought and just eating in raw. Gum Tree Honey from the Liguarian bee was our favourite. It is not too sweet, light on the density scale and a golden brown in colour compared to the darker options. 

It is so yummy! 

We were so happy with our discovery that we bought a couple of tubs of honey (all different varieties)  for family and friends for Christmas. It sounds like a weird present, but seriously it is the purest most enjoyable taste-treat I have experienced in a really long time and I want to share it with EVERYONE!

ps. Here is a movie Olivia made while at the honey farm. She put it to music and did all the special effects- cute hu?

Happy Easter!

Here are some more pictures of our holiday over Easter Break-

First, Sovereign hill. Basically it is a reenactment of an early settlement town and en route to Adelaide from Melbourne. The kids loved it and it broke up the car ride (8 hours) to a more tolerable trip!

Here is Olivia with her new Aussie Outback hat. She bought it with her own money (which was probably close to 6 weeks allowance) and plans to use it busking over the holidays.

Here is the town bowling alley-

Here we are at the candle making factory

listening to a band

At the base of the town was a gold panning river. These little forts were what the gold miners would live in. Stan and I thought it was funny there was an American flag on display

The girls finding gold!

And lastly the kids watch a theater production and they wanted a picture with the cast!

Once we finished Sovereign Hill we spent the next few day at Kangaroo Island.

Easter Holiday- Kangaroo Island

During the 4 day Easter Weekend we decided to take a road trip to Kangaroo Island, off the coast of Adelaide in South Australia. It was an 8 hour drive from Melbourne + a 1 hour ferry ride over to the island. 

It was unique compared to other parts of Australia due to the large seal population (which could be found on the rocks and beaches).   Below are some pictures of what we saw.

 Here are some kangaroo's. Smaller and browner than the ones seen on mainland Australia (no these are not wallabies) the Wallabies were much smaller and more grey. Anyway, the Island was right to go by this name because the Kangaroo's were everywhere.

Here is Milse's lighthouse, which was part of (Flinders Chase National Park) 

Here we were on a scenic hike and I looked over the edge and saw about 40 seals playing in the tide. They were doing jumps and spinning around. It was beautiful! Sadly, I only had my iphone with me and these are the best pictures I could get. If you zoom in, you should be able to see the seals in that little cove near the bottom.

 After this hike we meandered down the road and walked down a boardwalk. This lead us to some rocks and a covered cave by the ocean. Inside were hundreds of seals! lucky for us there were also babies nursing (probably 3-4 months old) and lots of mothers sleeping. It was amazing to watch.

Admiral Arch, and behind me are of the New Zealand fur seals which live in southern NZ and southern AU.

Next we visited "the remarkable rocks"...which were actually quite remarkable :-)

 Here I asked Thomas to come away from the edge of that rock, he said "in Just a minute mom, I am checking out the world..."then he turned around and I took this picture. I didn't even tell him to put his hands up, how cute is that?!

 

Thomas wanted to know if we could live here. Each kid picked out a little hole they planned to make their room/ bed. I think we would have had no problems being cavemen! 

 After visiting the remarkable rocks, we headed over to the ocean, where we got to climb on some more rocks and get splashed by the tide!

  I love this picture below of Stan and Olivia-

 Here is one picture from Kelly Hill Caves which we explored as a family. Again the iPhone didn't work that well with so much darkness 

Lucky for us the Easter Bunny came to our little cabin- It was pretty easy to find Easter baskets this year!l

 Here we are riding the ferry back to Adelaide so we can begin our drive home for work on Tuesday.

After our holiday at Kangaroo Island we decided to spend a day in Adelaide seeing the signs. Here we are at the Adelaide Zoo. Here is Mary with a kookaburra

 After the Zoo we got lunch at Hahndorph (a small village settled by Germans over 100 years ago. The buildings were very German and the town was like walking back in time. Very lovely and friendly and great food and shops.

Yes, it is fall here :-)  

 Stan picked up some gingerbread men on his way out of the town that we could eat in the car on our way back home to Melbourne.