I know it looks like we’ve been doing nothing since July, but we’ve been very busy.
At the end of July, we took our final harvest. This time, it was liquid honey rather than cut-comb, and that involved a lot of equipment that we hadn’t seen for a year, much of which hadn’t been returned by whoever had borrowed it last August, and taking it, together with the honey boxes, to somebody’s kitchen (and even that’s not simple, as you can’t just borrow anybody’s kitchen. To stand a chance, you’ve got to target people who’ve never extracted honey before.)However much or little honey there is, extracting honey is hard work, especially when it involves a steepish hill, a manually-operated extractor and an upstairs kitchen. Even at home, all those buckets and and strainers and implements will need cleaning and putting away and, naturally, hardly any of them will fit in a sink. And that’s before we’ve even thought of working out how many jars and lids and labels we’re going to need.
Honey Pyramid
While all that’s happening, the bees need preparing for Winter. Towards the end of summer, we have to inspect all the bees for diseases and decide if action needs to be taken. Some diseases we have to notify to the Bee Inspector, some we can treat against, and some we can safely ignore.
This year, the Bee Inspector made a visit, so we got to see how it’s supposed to be done. We got the all-clear for foulbrood diseases, but our varroa levels were very high, so we began treating the hives for that. Varroa treatment is relatively simple – we just place trays of thymol-containing gel in the top of each hive – but it takes up to six weeks, and only works if the weather isn’t too cold, so it needs to be done before autumn has a chance to get nasty. It also means, for our hives at least, making little wooden frames to make space for the trays to sit in as, with grim inevitability, we’d lost the ones we made last year. There are other threats to worry about, too, and precautions against both wasps and mice need taking. (The cat, incidentally, is mostly gratuitous. This year we’ve spent money on mouseguards.)
So, all that, together with the London Honey Festival (we won no prizes), is why I didn’t find time to write much in August.
An Early Harvest Festival
September is the month that beekeeping really turns from a quietly antisocial hobby into a social maelstrom of gladhanded cheeriness and cut-throat competition. It’s the month when all the local end-of-summer shows and events seem to happen, including the Thames Festival, the Bromley and Orpington Honey Show (we forgot to enter) and, closer to home, a series of cookery demonstrations, plant sales and workshops at the Community Greenhouses. And it’s not just beekeepers who have to travel. You might have seen some of our bees at the Bermondsey Street Festival, for example, and they don’t always go quietly.
Even October is relatively packed with tempting events that add to the pressure on time and the number of chores. We failed miserably to enter the Brockwell honey for the London Honey Show on account of misreading the form, and we’ve missed the deadline for the National Honey Show at the end of October. Our excuse for that is that the honey is beginning to crystallize already, so we can’t tell if we should be entering it as ‘clear’ or ‘set’. It’s not a very good excuse, but I can’t think of anything better (except for the excuse we’ve got for not entering the cake. Very tasty it was). We’re also having to prepare more sugar syrup than ever – we usually use this just to feed the smaller, weaker colonies that haven’t managed to store enough honey to meet their own needs, but this year we’ve heard that even large colonies have been starving. For some reason, colonies didn’t bring in much nectar in September, so we’re helping them make up the difference.
But, if I’m honest, my only excuse is that, although preparing sugar syrup isn’t a very exciting pastime, it is more urgent, and apparently more fun, than cobbling together a blog.
