Bees and honey

The garden is humming with bees, bumbles of many different species, and of course our honeybees, gathering pollen for their brood and nectar to make into honey. Sunny June suited them well, and I had high hopes for a good honey harvest, but with the washout of July, my expectations are no longer great. Any day now I will take off some combs, perhaps tomorrow if it's fine so lots of bees are flying - the fewer in the hives to defend against my burglary, the better.

I prefer to err on the side of generosity as a beekeeper, leaving them plenty of their own stores for the winter, and mixing 10% honey back into the sugar syrup that I feed to replace the stolen booty. I also add a few drops of chamomile tea, a biodynamic technique, to aid their digestion of the refined white sugar (they cannot metabolise brown). This year for the first time the chamomile is homegrown, so I trust the tea will suit them especially well - and my family too, to soothe indigestion or calm troubled nerves.