Ten litres of wild honey

From our bees

I wanted to share with you something from this morning.

The results of this year’s honey harvest from just one of our hives..

Back in March we set down two colonies of bees in the orchard here, letting them quietly go about their business of foraging for pollen with minimal intervention from us. Seven months of a steep learning curve later and we’ve helped our bees produce about ten litres of wild honey.

Our other colony has been a little depleted after the queen swarmed back in May, and with the bees rearing a replacement that they liked (they chose one from four Queen cells) the hive seemed always a little on the back foot. Varroa mite was heavy in that second colony so this month we have treated them using thymol and oxalic acid smoke leaving them all of their honey for their winter stores.

This bucket of deeply floral sweetness, a pronounced taste of willow pollen if you concentrate your palate, is the excess from a hive of over sixty thousand bees. They still have plenty for their winter months.

A recipe for preserved green figs, fennel seeds and mandarin cooked slowly in honey will be with you later this weekend. They make a delicious accompaniment to a piece of cheddar.

Until then

William