Adventuresinbeeland's Blog

A continuation of my previous post on the first ever London Honey Show. I’m going to kick this one off with a few photos:

That pretty white hive is a WBC, named after its British inventor, William Broughton Carr. Not the most practical of beehives, but very recognisably a beehive and much nicer to look at than the plain wooden boxes my bees live in. Next to the WBC is a yellow & grey Omlet Beehaus, the plastic hives loved by fashion conscious urban beekeepers.

Warre hive

And a couple of the tall Warre hive, a vertical version of a top-bar hive. From the little I’ve heard about them, Warre hives are favoured by beekeepers who like to take a hands-off, minimal inspections approach.

Chris Beale – Chairman of the Pinner & Ruislip Beekeepers
“Marketing Honey & Wax Products (the byproducts of the hive)”

Going back to my talk notes, the third and last talk I attended was by Chris, Chairman of the nearby Pinner & Ruislip association. In Chris’s view, honey, wax, propolis etc are mere byproducts of the main hive product, which is pollination of London’s flowers. His talk gave us some ideas on how to use these gorgeous byproducts produced by the bees. Right now, Chris has 800 pounds of honey sitting in his kitchen, so using it up is on his mind!

Propolis
Quite valuable. Can be distilled in alcohol for a sore throat cure – but watch out, this liquid will burn! It’s a sticky, red-brown substance which bees collect from trees like conifers which secrete resin. It has antibacterial and antifungal properties, which is why the bees use it to cover any large objects in the hive too large for them to carry out, such as mice which have intruded into the hive and died.

Pollen
Can be jarred up and sold for a good price – £4-5 a jar – to people who put it on their breakfast cereal as a cure for hayfever. See the Pinner & Ruislip Association’s page ‘Honey and Hay-fever’ for an explanation of why local honey and pollen might help your hayfever – their website is beautifully designed and well worth looking at for their innovative use of grass imagery!

Mead
Honey and water with added yeast, yeast nutrient, tannin and citric acid. 900g/2lb/5 cups of honey produces about 3 litres (5 1/2 pints) of mead. Retails at £8 a bottle but you need a licence to sell it in the UK – don’t be tempted to sell without one!

Lipbalm
Wax from your honey cappings makes great lipbalm,  but be careful to label all the ingredients in case anyone’s allergic to one of them.

Here’s a lip balm recipe from Collins Beekeeper’s Bible:

Makes 5-6 x 15ml pots
20g beeswax
10g lanolin
10g cocoa butter
10g olive oil
40g sweet almond oil
2 tsp honey (any variety chosen for taste, but try borage or honey blossom)

1. Melt the wax in a bain-marie over a gentle heat.
2. In a separate pan, gently heat the lanolin and cocoa butter, stirring until the mixture is fully liquid.
3. Add the olive and sweet almond oils, stirring over a low heat until fully combined, then stir in the melted beeswax.
4. Remove from the heat and allow the mixture to cool until just beginning to set, then add the honey, stirring thoroughly until fully incorporated.
5. Scoop into pots and leave to set at room temperature.

Beeswax polish
Wax plus turpentine and essence of lavender (to make it smell nice) makes a lovely polish.  But watch out – the turpentine makes the mixture extremely flammable and Chris told us about a local beekeeper who went to answer the phone and came back to find his kitchen on fire. It melts at 62F. The National Trust polish furniture once a year using beeswax polish.

Here’s a recipe from Keeping Bees and Making Honey by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum (2008):

Beeswax wood finish (for bare wood)
You will need: 55g (2oz) beeswax, 300ml (1/2pt) turpentine, bain marie.
1. Melt the wax in the bain marie.
2. Remove from the heat source and pour in the turpentine.
3. Return to the heat and give a gentle stir.
4. Cool, and spoon into sealable containers.
5. Warm slightly before applying to bare wood. Apply with a soft cloth, allow to dry, then buff with a wool cloth. Can also be used on leather.

Candles
Thornes make silicone candle moulds, including a Christmas tree candle which can be coloured green to disguise any dirty wax. Beeswax should be melted in a double boiler bain-marie, without coming into direct contact with the water or the heat. The temperature of the wax can be checked with a sugar thermometer. The melting point range for beeswax is 62-64 °C (144-147 °F).

Honey
You can sell this either in crystallised or liquid form, but don’t sell jars with a mix of the two.  If you’re going to sell your honey, it’s worth buying a refractometer to check the water content is low enough to meet legal specifications for honey. If the honey contains too much water, it can ferment and cause the jar to explode. Honey jars must also be clean and full to the top with honey – otherwise people can complain to Trading Standards!

Don’t be tempted to cut in shop-bought honey with your own to make a bit more of a profit. You can easily be caught! Chris told us the story of a British beekeeper who mixed up different types of honey. He was found out because pollen grains from different plants can be identified under a microscope – and British honey does not contain eucalyptus pollen.

Chris’s tip was that nostalgia sells honey. He once had shiny black and gold labels made up which he considered very smart and stylish. Yet when the public saw those labels next to some others he had with a colourful picture of a country cottage, the cottage won every time. And buy tamper proof labels that stick down over the lid. Sell your honey for about £4.50-5.00 minimum a jar – more than supermarket honey, but you have a premium product with real taste and flavour on your hands.

An example of a ‘country cottage’ style honey label, sold for £5.30 for a 100 on the Paynes Bee Farm website.

I recommend Keeping Bees and Making Honey by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum (2008) for lots of info on using your bee products, including extracting/showing honey, making candles and cosmetics/cooking recipes. Or, if you have a bigger budget, the Collins Beekeeper’s Bible, a much heftier tome which you won’t be taking to read on the bus. It contains a whole chapter on ‘Honey and other Bee Products’, including beeswax, candles, propolis, pollen, bee venom and royal jelly, with plenty of recipes.

Yesterday I went to the first ever London Honey Show at the Lancaster London hotel (see www.londonbees.com for the hotel’s bee blog), a celebration of London honey which included a tasting competition, free talks and plenty of honey/bee related stalls to visit. It was a lot of fun! Lovely to see so many beautiful London honeys on display, from pale yellow to deep reds.

My notes from the talks:

Ian Douglas – Telegraph journalist
“Why London is the perfect place to keep bees”

I enjoy reading Ian’s articles on his beekeeping in the Daily Telegraph: www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/beekeeping. So I was pleased to be able to hear him speak in person about why London is such a great place to keep bees.

Ian reminded us of the literary image of beekeeping as a solitary pursuit, conducted in an idyllic rural retreat. This is typified by the W.B.Yates poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree‘:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And Sherlock Holmes himself, too, retired to Sussex to divide his time “between philosophy and agriculture”, watching the gangs of workers as once he watched the criminals of London. There he produced his magnum opus of his latter years, a ‘Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen.’

But despite such literary ideas of peaceful countryside buzzing, Ian told us that in reality urban environments are now the best place for bees. Around 14% of London is green – gardens, parks, trees, with 85 square miles given over to gardens. In contrast, the countryside is now often the home of monocrops, relieved only by strips of hedgerow of varying flower foraging quality. Sussex Downs, for instance, is mainly teasel (a kind of thistle) and grass – great for sheep, ok for bees – but not brilliant. London has a longer season for flowers and provides a more varied diet. One of Ian’s friends recently patiently identified 250 different kinds of pollen on his varroa board.

[The day after Ian’s talk, the BBC ran an article on how the believed to be extinct solitary bee, Halictus eurygnathus, has been re-discovered on the Sussex South Downs. The bees enjoy the greater knapweed there, which is one of the special flowers of chalk grassland. So we need grasslands too – but preferably ungrazed ones – grazing sheep present a risk to the bees’ favourite plants].

Other cities in the world are good for bees too, Ian told us, but none quite rival London. In Paris you have to register with a vet and are put on a national beekeepers register which you can be struck off from for bad behaviour! In New York, beekeeping has only recently become a legal activity. Before, there was a $2,000 fine. So the beekeeping community cannot yet have the same camaraderie we do here. Sydney has the advantage of being varroa free, plus enormous parks, but is just too hot! Ian enjoys a beekeeping blog by a beekeeper in Tokyo who talks at length about the advantages of there being no bears in Tokyo… but Tokyo surely does not have the green space we do. And Milan – well, it would be impossible to find the right outfit to wear.

Ian did not get much honey from his two beehives this year (a Dartington and a plastic Omlet Beehaus) – only 80ml. Nonetheless, he loves his bees and finished by asking us to raise a glass to them, and to London beekeeping.

Tim Baker – Head Teacher at Charlton Manor Primary
“Bees in school; overcoming the challenges”

Tim told us the story of how bees came to his school. Usually a beekeeper chooses to keep bees; in Tim’s case, the bees chose him! He had already created a wildlife garden at the school. Then, in July 2008, a swarm settled on the school’s entrance. Tim was fascinated to see the reactions of the children and staff – the children wanted to watch the bees, the staff were worried about getting stung.

Tim decided the school should keep their new arrivals and contacted the local Ruxley Beekeepers club. Creating an observation hive with openable windows in the brood box and supers was a project he thought would cost £200 and ended up costing nearer £2,000! But it has been well worth it for the enjoyment and learning opportunities it has brought the children.

A pupil competition was launched for a design to paint the hive with. A cute ‘Home Sweet Home’ design won, which can be partially seen in the photo below. The pupils also build the frames themselves and take part in weekly inspections. When honey extraction time comes they borrow equipment from Ruxley Beekeepers and get involved in jarring the honey, which enthusiastic parents buy up almost instantly from the school’s ‘Sweet Pickings’ stall.

Tim recently held a workshop day for other schools to see how the beekeeping is done – many schools from around the country attended, so hopefully many more pupils will get the chance to learn from the bees.

See the Capital Growth website for a pdf version of Tim’s presentation and a case study of the project. The Guardian has a Charlton Manor picture gallery at www.guardian.co.uk/education/gallery/2011/aug/30/beekeeping-in-schools.

Chris Beale – Chairman of the Pinner & Ruislip Beekeepers
“Marketing Honey & Wax Products”

To be continued – I’m getting a bit tired out now, so will type up my notes from Chris’s talk some other time soon! [Edit: see London Honey Show: part 2 for the follow-up post]