Cabbage Head.

With a large portion of my day spent with honey up to my elbows from cleaning equipment at Newbattle, I wasn’t going to touch a precious camera until I was home and washed. There were about fifteen of us doing routine maintenance with opening hives being banned for the day as several of the volunteers are allergic to bee venom. We had a short respite when P.C. Plod arrived to take statements, we hadn’t expected him until Wednesday; and the bees seem quite unaffected by yesterday’s adventure.
 
My task was cleaning frames ready for them being sterilized with a hot air gun; the frames had old, dirty honeycomb, a lot of which still had a mixture of honey and sugar syrup left over from the winter stores, this is no use at all, partly because it can carry disease from one colony to another. Bees have two main methods of storing toxins such as pesticides, one of which is locking it into the wax. Historically, bees in the wild would not have had such waste disposal problems, man has had a devastating influence, and honeycomb would not have lasted long enough to build up dangerous levels of contamination.
 
Surprisingly, their other waste bin is their bodies; a healthy adult bee has a life span of only six weeks before dying of old age, not long enough for them to suffer any serious effects; far better than contaminants being fed to the growing larvae or ending up in the food stores, so the honey you might buy from me is free from the pesticides that the bees collect from oil seed rape.
 
Another of the "Year With My Camera" challenges is to, “take 20 completely different portraits of an item (e.g. a vegetable.)” I’ll try not to bore you with another nineteen  portraits of the bl**dy thing as it slowly decomposes over the next few weeks – but you might have to put up with a montage. The Blip reminds me of a book I once read called, “Cabbage Heads and Chess Kings.”