Shelagh take a bow

Like the Tour de France, John le Carre novels, The Wire and Steely Dan, I had unconsciously parked ‘bees and honey’ somewhere in the Waiting Room of Interests for Later in Life. I recognised there was something I might be hooked by if I started investigating, but I’m already swimming in a sea of semi-understood fascinations and borderline incompetencies. Any more could wait.

My hand was rather forced into bringing bees into the now when my wife’s randomly delivered apian facts from behind whichever bee-related book she was sat became actual beekeeping.

I had gathered by that process of daily attrition, that bees operate on what appears to be some higher level, as a squad of organised individuals dedicated to the whole and seemingly acting under the guidance of an unheard voice.

I had also grasped the fundamentals of bee society. Most colonies have a single fertile female, the queen, who lays all the eggs. The males, known as drones, have a bit of a rum do of things. Their single role in life is to mate with the queen (or indeed any other queen), at perhaps 80m up in the air, often some distance from the hive. So far so good. Although a queen is likely to mate with only a handful of the many drones, they, sadly, are the unlucky ones. The male’s intimate apparatus is barbed and as drone and queen part, it, along with a good part of its internal organs, are ripped off and he dies.

The other infertile females are known as workers, and it is they we see most of. They are quietly incredible. As well as cleaning and repairing any damage to the hive, workers fly out from the hive in search of pollen, taking it back to feed the growing population along with nectar which not only provides immediate energy but also for storage in wax cells and which they turn into honey by partially digesting, regurgitating and fanning with their wings to evaporate most of the water.

It is this quiet activity on which the whole of human existence depends. As the bees forage from flower to flower, a little pollen from one plant rubs on to the reproductive organs of another, in this way pollinating almost every crop on which we rely.

They build honeycomb in which the larvae develop and where pollen and honey are stored. That the cells of honeycomb are created as interlocking hexagons is beyond my comprehension. Bees building something beautifully hexagonal; that’s like a giraffe doing a crossword or a tapir using the cashpoint.

Beekeeping is the process of us taking advantage of what bees do naturally – we provide a home (known as a brood box) onto which we add tiers (known as supers) that contain hanging rectangles (known as frames) in which the honeycomb is formed. As the hexagons fill with honey, they are sealed with wax by the workers and as one super’s frames become full another is added.

As they build up, you can consider harvesting some of the honey. We took three of the four full supers for honey this weekend, leaving time for the fourth to be filled for winter food.

Each of the frames (in our set up, there are ten to each super) is heavy, typically a little over 2kg each, three quarters of which is honey. You have to uncap the honeycomb, cutting their tops off with a bread knife, the wax falling into a hot, steaming tray below to melt along with whatever honey clings to it. The uncapped supers slide in on either side of a centrifugal spinner. Turn the handle and the frames are spun, the honey is cast out, glistening onto the inner walls of the cylinder and falling to the bottom. When sufficient accumulates, a tap releases the honey to pour though a filter into a separate settling tank (a wine fermenting barrel in our case).

A couple of days to allow it to settle and it can be decanted into jars.

How much can you get? A poor spring and a glorious half-summer’s foraging has given us enough for 70 jars, leaving plenty for the colony.

It is very different in flavour, aroma and invisible properties to most commercial honey.

Most honey has been filtered and heated and this changes it fundamentally. Filtering sieves out many of the beneficial elements such as propolis (a resin the bees use to repair and seal) alongside the nuggets of wax, while heating destroys vitamins and minerals as well as removing any possibility of bacteria surviving. It renders commercial honey nutritionally inferior.

This tastes like honey you’d dream about after a long evening on the strong cheese watching A Taste of Honey and listening to Bobby Goldsboro and Thom Yorke. Sweet yes, but there’s no hint of cloying. You can keep eating and eating it. This first batch is bright, pineappley and minty – quite glorious.

Last year, I was lucky enough to visit Annemie Maes rooftop garden in Brussels, a garden dedicated to bees. There were numerous hives and all the plants were chosen with them to forage in. It is a beautiful place, brought to life further by Annemie’s use of cameras that take you – via screens in her flat and online – into the workings of the hive. Her fabulous, freshly extracted honey also had a hint of mint to it and I remember her putting it down to the lime trees that flower in the city. I’ve planted a few dozen small-leaved lime trees, mainly for their young leaves in salad, so perhaps that’s the source of our honey’s mintiness.

One thing they do love, is the Szechuan pepper. The flowers seem too small to warrant their attention, but at a time of year when nectar and pollen sources are usually few, the peppers attract them. I’m sure I can pick up a little zingy trace of pepper in the honey but I may be imagining things.

What I am not imagining is how delicious this honey is and how weirdly, clichedly elemental it felt extracting it. We had paired up with the bees – my wife learning about beekeeping and installing the hive and me in planting shrubs that suit them, sowing green manures with their (and their wild relatives’) happy productivity in mind, and even though we knew that honey almost always results, it seems unbelievable. Holding a spoon interrupting the slow flow from spinner to settling tank and tasting that first honey is as pleasurable as that first glass of fizz, that first peach, those almonds we picked and shelled.