There are many “esteemed members” of beekeeping circles who are well, frankly, a bit pissed off that the news over the last couple of years about declining bee numbers and colonies collapsing, along with the resultant worries about harvest failures on a catastrophic scale has brought armies of novice beekeepers into the “hobby” with little or no clue about what they’re doing.

We are, of course, novice beekeepers ourselves, though we did go on a course before starting out on our own and we’ve read loads and loads of stuff that has helped us to keep our colony going through last winter and now, in 2009, we’ve split the colony into two so we now have two hives going into this winter.

Sadly though, despite a much better start to our season, hence the need to split our colony into two (by artificial swarming), the wet weather in July and August has stopped our bees from foraging during these critical months.

So, now, as we go into winter, we have one hive where there seem to be enough stores to last the colony through, the other hive has little or nothing in reserve for the lean times ahead. This means that for the second year in a row, in order to make sure the well-being of our bees is put in front of our own needs, we’ll not be taking any honey at all from them. The good Dorises of “White City” (our new, white hive) will also need feeding with a sugar solution to make sure they have enough to eat to get them through the winter.

DM did his last inspection last week and removed the queen excluder from one of the hives (the metal plate at the bottom of this pic). He took with it some brace honey comb, built by the bees to link their frames with the outer part of their environment. We were very excited to discover that the brace comb contains a small amount of white, highly crystalline honey. It’s from ivy nectar, which has a bad reputation for making very solid honey, which is difficult to extract.

We don’t care though – if they’re foraging now and bringing home nectar, they can store plenty of food late in the season for the winter.

Anxious for our first taste of the Mingay Dorises honey, we each pulled plugs of white, granular honey and tasted what our bees have been busy making. WOW! It punches you in the face by comparison to the bland honey available in the supermarket. You can tell it’s a natural product. You can tell it’s full of good things. You can also tell it’s full to bursting point of flavour.

If you look carefully, you can see it in the back of some of these comb cells (look in the centre at the bottom of the image).

It’s a good job we didn’t go into beekeeping for the honey (though some for us would have been very welcome)……in case anyone didn’t know, we went into it for increased pollination in my vegetable garden and I’ve certainly had my best crops this year of any year since we came here.

We see the Dorises in the garden and around our locale regularly and believe me, there is no finer pastime than to lie on the grass in the field, in their flight path and watch them head home laden with pollen and nectar.

Being a novice beekeeper is not for the fainthearted, but it sure gives us a nice warm feeling and a taste of honey is certainly NOT worse than none at all. It’s ambrosial.