The bees this year have thrown away their text books and decided to give beekeepers a run for their honey. New queens (which are produced in May, June and July) should stay in their hives for a year or so before swarming. Swarming is just what beekeepers don’t want because basically about half the bees in the hive fill up on (your) honey and sod off with the queen to the far side of beyond, pretty much guaranteeing a poor honey crop and forcing the colony to start again from scratch. This year, probably because of the unusually long and warm summer the queens have been swarming out after just a month or so, which is, to say the least, very annoying.
Never the less, I’ve managed to take off about 70 pounds of honey which is a record for me. All this abundance reminds me of childhood harvest festivals and I mentioned to a beekeeping friend that as I am no longer religious I have no one to give thanks to for such a harvest. He answered with a wry smile that I’d missed the blinding obvious and that I should give my thanks to the Bees, which I hereby do!
This month’s words have been ‘too much’ or even ‘much too much too much’. It is great to go up into the garden and simply pick your breakfast/lunch/dinner and it seems a little churlish to complain but there are times when I want to go up there and holler at the top of my voice ‘For God’s sake ease up a bit’.
Having waited for months for signs of life we are now in a position where we are exhausted and can’t keep up with all the produce. Getting home after an evening out and having to go out again and crop the next kilo of raspberries (and hull them and get them on a tray in the freezer) before they go off gets to be just a teensy bit trying. Mind you, having seen the price of raspberries in the super markets I am tempted to invent a new category of worker who could be described as ‘fruit rich but cash poor.’