A recent addiction to the Goodful Facebook feed has had me sampling new recipes. A flourless recipe for Banana Oatmeal muffins caught my eye.

Eager to try it, I decided to follow the recipe to the letter but by doing a straight substitution of honey in place of the maple syrup the original recipe calls for.

Ingredients

• 2 bananas
• 2 eggs
• ⅓ cup honey 
• ¼ teaspoon salt 
• 2 teaspoons baking powder 
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 
• 1 tablespoon cinnamon 
• 1 cup Greek yogurt 
• 3 cups oats 
• 1 cup whole milk 
• Your preferred topping: healthy or otherwise (I chose to finish leftover Mackintosh's toffees from Halloween)

The full instructions, including a helpful video can be found on Buzzfeed.

A successful change of sweetener and a very yummy treat!

These Bite-Sized Banana Oatmeal Muffins Are Perfect For Snack Time

As can sometimes happen at this time of year,  one of the urban hives produced a number of swarms which also means a parade of new queens have been hatched over the last few weeks.

Unfortunately, the latest queen wasn't laying and when beekeeper-in-charge, Cam, sought her out to see what was wrong, it was apparent that she hadn't mated. A virgin queen is to be expected not long after the old queen has swarmed but having given her a couple of weeks it became obvious that this queen had something wrong with her and needed to be replaced.

Had there been fresh brood in the hive Cam would merely have had to dispose of the queen and the hive would have produced an emergency queen. Unfortunately, weeks without a viable breeder meant that we would have to intervene.

It is easy enough to purchase mated queens and they get shipped to us in the mail, however, with plentiful swarms and a shortage of spare hive boxes and frames, it was decided to boost the endangered colony by introducing not just a queen but an entire hive. Effectively, we were reinstating one of the hive's previous queens and her bees.

Merging colonies is a tricky business. The queenless colony is apt to kill the introduced queen as an interloper and the bees will fight if you just throw them together. However, time for the queen's scent to permeate the hive will familiarise the bees with her. Separating the two colonies using newspaper is an old but very effective trick and one we've successfully used before.

By the time the two sets of bees have eaten through the newspaper, both colonies will accept the queen and become a single hive.

Andrew and Cam demonstrate how this is done in video.

On Christmas Day, my mother requested that I make a dressing for the head of broccoli she was cooking. The dressing I came up with was very light and slightly sour on the finish which I like. The addition of honey and forgoing the salt mellows the acidity and makes a nice, slightly sweet variation to the original: probably suited to a wider range of palettes.

I've since made this broccoli and asparagus dish with the cranberry dressing a couple more times. Yum!!!

Today I served it warm for dinner with a couple of lamb roulades bought ready to bake from our local New World supermarket. The butcher took pains to let me know that the roulades have a new fig and pistachio stuffing. The two dishes were complementary and made my high protein, low carb meal extremely palatable and tasty!

As 4 minutes on high in the microwave and a couple of minutes for the dressing was all it took to prepare the vegetables, it's also a very quick meal. Great for busy households such as ours.

Instructions

Soften a head of broccoli and around ten asparagus spears: you can steam, toss in a frypan of boiling water or a few minutes on high in the microwave if you're in a hurry. Rinse the greens under cold water to stop the cooking and keep a little crunch.

Mix 1 tablespoon of olive oil, 2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar and a teaspoon of honey with a generous handful of chopped, dried cranberries.

Pour the dressing over the greens and toss until the vegetables take on a glossy sheen. Serve warm straightaway with hot meat or allow to cool and serve as a salad.

If you prefer to plate up, like I do, be sure to use a spoon to scoop some of the dressing from the bottom of the bowl and drizzle over the vege! The cranberries atop the greens make a beautiful, polished finish to the plate.

Depending on what else is on the menu you may also like to add some roughly crushed almonds for additional texture.

Bees are wonderful, productive, mesmerising creatures who not only provide us with yummy produce in the form of honey, but are also an essential part of the horticultural cycle by pollinating a wide variety of plants. This blog follows our adventures in setting up a number of hives, in a variety of locations as we learn what makes good beekeepers.

The video on this post shows a busy bee on the quest for pollen. See the bright coloured polyps on her legs full of orange pollen.