From A to Bee (34 page)

And even…

In the end I decided on taking shopping to a new level and went on the search for beekeeping equipment. Oh dear, what have I become? I think this must have been going through Jo's head when I told her. My poor wife. I'm no longer the husband she married.

  I left the house with a spring in my step and made the forty-minute drive south to Paynes, the beekeeping store in Hassocks, Sussex. Driving down I was imagining it to be just a normal-sized, modern-looking shop on a high street but selling beekeeping equipment.

  I was driving down a normal main road, which was looking suspiciously residential, when a sign appeared on my left hand side – that was it – Paynes Bee Supplies. It led me down a tiny one-way private road, only just large enough for a single car to travel along safely, with houses on each side.

  I came to a small row of houses and what appeared to be a large shed off to the back of it. And that was the shop. I couldn't hide my delight. A really well-known beekeeping company was basically being run from a shed!

  I walked up to the shed (OK, it was actually quite a large shed with what looked like extensions on all sides, but did I mention that it was yellow?) and it all seemed deserted. I then noticed that its opening times, stuck on a board on the now closed shed door, were 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at weekends. Damn, it was 2.30 p.m. I couldn't believe it, how stupid was I, not to have looked up the opening times before I left?

  My luck must have been in however, as a man in his early forties came out of the house next door, said 'Hi, I'm Mike,' and promptly opened up the shed. 'I'm still here so I thought I would say hi.' I am sure I wouldn't get this sort of service at a normal shop on a high street one and a half hours after closing time.

  My first impression when I entered the shed was one of delight. The first thing I wanted, a large green feeder like one I had borrowed earlier in the year from Suzy, was literally at my fingertips as I walked through the door. This made a nice change to my usual incompetent bumbling around supermarket aisles trying to find something.

  The place was jam-packed, floor to ceiling with bee equipment. Everything you could conceivably think of was available; the sheer amount of equipment they had fitted into the shop was incredible. There were hive parts everywhere, not to mention frames, feeders, extraction equipment and even a variety of ratchet mechanisms. I could have stayed there for hours looking through it all and learning what equipment did what but I felt sorry for Mike who had opened up just for me so I felt it was time to go.

  Then I became distracted by the wall of honey and I was rooted to the spot. I may now know that there are more varieties of honey than you can get from a supermarket, but this really took it to a new level. With the honey jars displayed together in a simple but striking manner it was stunning to see the different coloured honey next to each other. The collection of honey made up an entire wall spanning about 8 feet by 8 feet and it was like looking at a rainbow of honey colours with everything from runny honey to solid, more granular varieties.

  It was literally covered with jars of honey in all shapes and sizes and from all corners of the globe – I noticed New Zealand, Australia, Bulgaria and even Hungary – and it was a sight to behold. I didn't notice any Polish honey, however; those gents from the parking lot back in May this year obviously weren't that good at marketing their product outside of Lodz. I was pretty sure that Jo liked really runny honey and so I picked up what I could tell was the runniest honey, which was from Hungary. It was Echinacea honey and looked almost the consistency of water and beautiful with its rich golden colour. To be classified as Echinacea honey it must be a monofloral honey, which means that the hives that this honey came from have been placed in an area almost exclusively made up of Echinacea. That must be quite a sight.

  Mike was lovely and really nice to talk to; apparently they have over 500 hives dotted around Sussex. Can you imagine? That could equate to 30 million bees at the height of summer! It takes over four weeks just to extract the honey, even though they have an extractor that fits forty frames at a time (the usual extractors fit only four or six). Amazing.

  After about half an hour I decided to leave Mike to his Saturday afternoon. Having heard all about marking queens and knowing that I struggle to see my queen in the National hive, I took on some of Mike's advice and left with a 'queen marking cage', which allows you to isolate her without other bees around. While she is trapped you can apply some gentle pressure to expose her thorax and can then dab her with a special marker pen to leave a permanent mark. It allows you to identify her far more easily in the future. Mark advised me to go for a blue marker pen as he reminded me that each year the colour changes for your queen. In short, if you have a queen born in a certain year you have to mark her with a certain colour. This allows you to keep a record of how old she is but also, if they swarm, it allows the new recipient to work out her age as well.

  I left a happy man but I arrived home to realise that I had mucked up. Jo actually liked really thick honey. Damn. Still, it was a really nice afternoon and I am really pleased I got down there.

Still no capped honey! This isn't going well and it's looking increasingly unlikely that I'm going to get my jar of honey this year.

I find it most perturbing at the moment. Everyone is starting to talk about the bees slowing down with their queens laying less, the honey flow being over and it feeling autumnal already. No, no, no, it should be the height of summer! I usually love August but this is getting me down.

  It seems that as soon as I have got myself started on this whole bee journey it is already coming to a close with the season drawing to an end. My local association announced at the last evening meeting that inspections will start to decrease at the end of the month once all the extractions have taken place. Apparently after an extraction, beekeepers will generally check their hives every other week as the season starts to wind down.

  To me it brings a whole new dimension to beekeeping and I will have to read up on looking after them through the winter. A lot of people feed bees and some even wrap the hives up to keep them nice and warm.

  No honey for me this year, then. I must just get them through the winter. A shame really but there you go. It is funny, at the start of the year I was so desperate to gain a jar of honey but as the year has gone on, having now got my bees, I realise there is much more to it than just the honey. However much I would have loved to get a jar, in reality it is about helping them out. Now that I have these bees I feel a real sense of responsibility and wonderment towards them and I just want to make sure they will be all right going into next year. It's funny how your priorities change, isn't it?

I am the type of person that likes to bury their head in the sand and I feel I have been doing this recently. I know I should really be thinking about the bees' well-being as autumn approaches, but there is definitely an element of disappointment with the chances of a jar of honey diminishing. I just haven't felt like writing a lot recently. However, I have had a week off from work, where I went away with the family and I am back with a cunning plan (similar to those that Baldrick used to conjure up if you are a
Blackadder
fan like me – which perhaps doesn't bode too well).

  There are many stories of heather honey floating around at the moment as it has been such a good year for honey production. This almost mythical honey is produced late in the season as heather usually flowers late in the summer once the nectar flow has finished elsewhere. The Yorkshire moors are renowned for having heather in abundance. One slight problem, however, is the fact that I am about five hours away from the north and though in one of Baldrick's madcap plans I would probably fly up there on the back of one of the bees, I cannot justify these geographical factors in my plan.

  Therefore today I felt it was time to put on my thinking cap at lunch over a cup of coffee and a sandwich. My first approach was to put a shout out to my Twitter and Facebook followers to see if anyone knew of a sizeable area of heather that is local to me. This was an easy first step but I had no idea of where to go next. I was prepared to move my beehive somewhere in the south-east but no further. It left me with a pretty sizeable area to search and my resources were limited.

  During these moments of pondering I received a good omen. Another regular at the coffee shop popped in and said hello. David, a chef who regularly walks in straight from work with the classic checkerboard chef's trousers, then said quite loudly, 'Ah ha, just the person – I have something for you!' Having absolutely no idea what he was talking about, I wondered exactly what he could have got for me. He disappeared back out of the cafe and wandered off down the street. Now David and I have rarely spoken but he had gleaned that I was a beekeeper, despite my appearance in a suit and tie, and that I was aiming for a jar of honey this year.

  In fact it's become a bit of a regular question now on a Monday lunchtime. As soon as I arrive, Joe and Gareth, the two guys who run the shop, and David ask me how the hive inspection went at the weekend. Recently they have been met with a rather glum face and I was probably answering much like a teenager with a shrug of the shoulders and a grunt. It must have been obvious to them that I had lost a little bit of interest as I wasn't really in the mood to discuss the bees but I hadn't mentioned that I was not expecting the jar this year – more out of pride than anything else.

  Three large slurps of coffee – and several crazy thoughts on how to get my hive to a heather area – later, David popped back with a blue plastic bag containing a small, unobtrusive parcel. He had been down to Cornwall on holiday, had seen this and thought of me. How very strange, I thought, as other than discussions about his outrageous gambling habit and my on going beekeeping obsession, we hadn't really spoken. In fact, I had only worked out his name two weeks' previous.

  Over another slurp of coffee I unwrapped the parcel, only to unveil a rather plain-looking box. When I opened it up, though, and dug through the tissue paper to get to what lay within, I was speechless. David had only gone and bought me a honeypot with a honey spoon! It had a rather quaint design but it had a very nice bee on the lid. I was really touched by this gesture and there and then I made a pledge to him and the cafe owners, Joe and Gareth, that I would now raise my game. Come what may I would get that jar of honey. I would then come into the cafe, buy them all a coffee and toast, demand Joe and Gareth to take a break and we would sit there together and enjoy the honey.