Flatters to Deceive

Starting the year with only one colony, that then got sick, we were not anticipating any early-season honey. The new colony, however, have done well - despite me splitting them and taking away their queen - and produced a little surplus, so today we had a mini harvest. Here is one quarter of it (or one third, if you count the frame partly visible at the bottom) 

The wax cappings on each honey cell are gossamer-thin and made from pure wax - not mixed with any tree-resin, as wax from elsewhere in the hive is inclined to be. Even the cappings on brood frames are biscuit-coloured, due to a little admixture of resin, which is helpful to the beekeeper who wants to know what is under the cap! When melted and filtered, cappings wax is the highest quality - used for lip balm, soap and cosmetics by people who are into that sort of thing

I delayed taking the honey - waiting for the queenly succession to take its course. I thought there were no crops of oilseed rape nearby this spring, so the problems of OSR honey would not affect us. Epic fail: the bees obviously found some somewhere and, beneath the veil of these cappings, a high proportion of cells contained honey that had crystallised. This creates two problems: 1. most of the solid honey cannot be dislodged by a centrifugal extractor; 2. Those crystals that do come out mix with the liquid honey and block the holes in the filters through which we pass the honey to take out flakes of wax. Our small harvest was gotten* by hard labour, and will taste all the sweeter for it

*my eye was caught by an article  in the Guardian about the reader reaction when they accidentally used the word 'gotten' rather than 'got' in another piece. By the time they finally closed down 'below the line' comments, it had reached 2,262! For comparison, a good opinion piece about the government ramping up both defence spending and bellicose rhetoric got 462. We are a strange lot