The rain fell pretty hard this morning. Thankfully, plan A for the day involved being indoors – at least for the morning.
We enjoyed a bit of a slow start to the day (Debbie and I didn’t even get out of bed til 8am – unheard of!) and after a bit of breakfast and the kids playing a few different card games, we headed out to Island Beehive. So, the only bee on KI is the Liguarian honey bee. And, just like on the mainland, there are plenty of producers of honey on KI. But the Island Beehive has a great setup for taking people through the production process and helping us learn more.
Hannah took us on a super informative tour and taught us plenty about the bees – from how their hives work (they have a see through hive in the main centre / gift shop) right through to how they collect the hives from around the Island and then extract the honey from them. Out of a total of 1200 hives, (from memory) they lost about two-thirds in the Black Summer fires that burnt about 50% of KI (essentially all of the western half). They’ve been able to get back up to 1000 hives, but still mostly on the eastern half of the island – it’ll be years until they can get large amounts of hives back on the western half.
The highlight for the kids (and for us, to be fair) was being able to taste their honey. Because of the way plants flower on KI, the honey is really seasonal! And so you can get honey from hives that are almost exclusively from, say, one type of gum tree. It was great to taste those subtle differences between different gum tree flowers.
Given we had to ditch all our honey in Victor Harbor before we got on the ferry for KI, it was time to grab a little bit of honey to keep in our little food box. We let the kids choose their own 50g jar of honey from one of the different varieties as well, which they were overly excited about.
By the time the afternoon rolled around, the rain had mostly eased off, and it didn’t look like there was much on the horizon. So we headed for a nice walk down to the Reeves Point Historic Site, which was the site where European Settlers first landed in 1836. We visited the oldest Mulberry tree in Australia (and the only living thing still remaining from the first settlement), and read a few other bits of information about the site. Right at the point was an amazing little bird watching hut where you could watch shorebirds that sit at the water’s edge – so many spices of bird come to rest at this site before they migrate later on. It was quite amazing to watch them for a while (but only for a little while – wasn’t overly exciting for the kids).
The later afternoon and evening were some tasty times for me (and for all of us as well) – I dropped into Kangaroo Island Spirits to do a gin tasting. They have such a beautiful outdoor garden area with bunches of tables – can imagine that in summer it would be bustling and a table would be hard to come by. They did a great tasting flight of their 5 gins, which was fun to experience. For dinner tonight, we headed out to Kangaroo Island Brewery – over the weekends they do woodfired pizzas, so we could keep warm in their lovely big brewery shed over pizza, and I could enjoy trying a few of their beers.
One more full day on KI to come tomorrow!
