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?
AUGUST 16
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.
Spurred on, I have spent this evening planning. There hasn't been much success from my social media following. I was offered a few fields of heather up in north Yorkshire but I don't think that is feasible. However…