Sweet reason

Method in our madness. Getting up to quite heavy showers encouraged us to do some more honey harvesting. Rainy beekeeping is usually unwise for bees and beekeeper, but today we wanted to take off the honey while there were as few wasps as possible to get excited by all that smelly sweetness. The same issue underlies us doing this unusually early in the year: if we have taken away the honey boxes, the bees are concentrated in a smaller volume and can focus their resources on defence. Any echo of national policy is purely coincidental - people have been tempted to use bees as a model of an idealised society throughout history, but metaphors are an unreliable guide to real-life choices

I thought I'd captured our labour-intensive uncapping process quite well: a mixing bowl; a wooden bridge; hold the frame vertical on the bridge with one hand; with the other, slip the long tines of the uncapping fork just under the wax cappings, and pull them off in feathery flakes (or sometimes a mangled sticky mass of compressed wax and honey). The flakes fall into the bowl; the uncapped frame is transferred to the centrifugal extractor. A little honey ends up in the bowl, but can be filtered out later. There is no excuse for drizzling it over raspberries and nectarines, but who needs an excuse