The gathering crowds.
The Lambeth Country Show is a surprisingly large event, considering that Lambeth farmers, on the whole, prefer anonymity. It’s also interestingly diverse, hosting a host of diversions including a Punch and Judy show, an onion contest, piglets, dodgems and a cider tent, in roughly ascending order of popularity.
It comes, approximately, two weeks before the average urban beekeeper starts panicking about the honey harvest, but as the London Beekeepers Association had booked a stall, it seemed sensible to harvest some of our cut comb, and see if anyone would buy it.
I was hoping to take some pictures of the process, but it’s a sticky business and I like my camera, so the best I could do was the picture below, which is what we start with.
A frame of comb honey.
This is a frame taken from one of the honey boxes on our hives, and it’s full of honeycomb, all sealed over with wax. Not all of the frames will be like this, and nearly half of those we looked at weren’t fully covered. When you’re extracting liquid honey, you can tolerate frames where a small percentage isn’t capped but for cut-comb it’s all got to be just right. If it is, all you need to do is cut it out.
A key point is not to cut it out from frames with wires in. Frames that we’re extracting for liquid honey contain wires to hold the comb together in a rotary extractor but they are no fun to cut through, and even less fun to eat. As you can’t see from the picture, it’s not always obvious which frames have wires, so it’s important to mark them when they go into the hive to save any bother later.
The actual harvesting of cut-comb involves a sharp knife, a steady hand and a cake rack so the slices of comb can drain nicely, without getting everything sticky. You also need gloves, a hat and, if necessary, a beard-guard, together with clean hands and a basic knowledge of food hygiene. But that’s the same for any sort of honey harvesting.
Comb honey in boxes
After that, you just need some boxes to put the slices in, and some labels. It all sounds ridiculously easy, and it is, apart from the wasps, which usually take a profound interest and are even more difficult to keep out of buildings than bees. It’s so easy that some beekeepers only ever extract cut comb. But liquid honey is easier to spread on toast, especially in the winter months, so most of us concentrate on that.
After harvesting, there’s usually the problem of finding somewhere safe to store the honey, but this time, we just took it over to the stall where, despite the poor weather, it all sold gratifyingly quickly. Of course, not everyone at the show could offer a pure, natural product made at the showground itself, or even in Lambeth, so we had a slight advantage.
The money it raised just about covers the cost of the frames we bought last winter, which is a good start. If we’re lucky, we might cover the cost of the two new hives and all the new honey boxes, in which case, the strange prospect of a surplus might arise. There again, it’s best not to count chickens before they’ve hatched.
Brockwell bees on holiday
It wasn’t just honey from the apiary that went to the London Beekeepers’ stall. They also had an observation hive, stocked up with bees from the Brockwell apiary. It got a lot of attention, and it’s always nice to be able to show people what bees look like, or at least, what wasps don’t look like. I was a bit worried that the bees might resent their confinement, but they were happy enough when we returned them, and don’t seem to have come to any harm. Normally when we take bees to shows, we have to ferry them across London, but for these bees it was, literally, a walk in the park.
