Adventures in Food

I don't have photos this time but have been bee-servicing again. This time we were just scraping honeycomb wax from the wooden frames so they can be reused for the coming year and the new bees. Bees are in a bad way and unlike other creatures in a similar, or worse, situation, People are notcing. This is because a) bees are quite cute b) people like honey c) bees pollinate fruit crops, and the fruit crops are suffering. I saw a little while back a Haagen Daaz campaign to help honeybees - because the bees are not there to pollinate fruits, and this is making it harder for the ice cream manufacturer to source and pay for fruits. It is a very serious problem in the US and also I have rumours from China and the Ukraine that they are losing fruit crops. One of the main threats to British honey bees is a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor. Originally confined to Asian honey bees, it has spread across Europe and reached England in 1992. It now infests 95 percent of hives. You can get...

Monday was a day famous for Snow, but for me it was also about honey. I visited Linda who has recently started keeping bees. We processed some honey and she very kindly gave me a pot of golden sweetness at the end. I learnt about mites, and deaths, and bee dancing and pollen and nectar and propolis (the red stuff in the pot - very sticky and it stains the hands, the bees make it from tree resin), and how the bees tenderly care for the grubs and feed them bees milk, and how the worker bees come out of the growing chambers and do housekeeping first for a few days, and then nursing, and then they guard the entrance, and then they start foraging only after all that. The pics show how we scraped the honey out of the combs, avoiding letting pollen and nectar into the honey, and let it drip through a net to separate it from the wax - collecting the was crumbs for melting down and further separation from the honey that is left; propolis; and the honey pots that were filled. 20 in total, from a...

Last Friday I went to a Kew Wassail in aid of making the apricot tree fruitful for the year. It was very exciting because I also met a woman with a sheep, and another woman who has a spinning wheel - and knows how to use it - so I think it was a very fruitful occasion already. AND I met a woman who keeps bees there (its called Pensford Fields and its a hidden gem of a kind of naturalness, behind some houses in Kew) and she wants help looking after the bees, so one day I might know enough to have my own honey. If there are any bees left , that is. Anyway the Wassail is meant to be around Twelfth night, when we know we are safely through the dark Solstice, and its time to get things going again so we have food for next winter. So we all pile down to the orchard and sing a song to the tree to ask it to be fruitful - and make it a toast - and make a lot of loud noise to chase away evil spirits ("and pollution" - maybe a reference to the pending expansion of Heathrow nearby), and ...