How did that happen?! The year has whizzed by, and summer has passed in a whirl, with family fun as priority. With grandchildren aged 8 and 2, and the beach on our doorstep, there’s been a lot of sun, sea and sand, plentiful ice-cream, and a fair amount of fish ‘n’ chips eaten straight from the box whilst sat on the sand/grass/prom bench: a lot of wet towels, soggy swimsuits and sandy shoes, bags of sea-glass, crabs in buckets and bundles of driftwood, with the highlight for me being my first attempt at SUP boarding – including of course the inevitable fall-off with a grand splash. To top it all, we’ve been back-garden camping in a fabulous VW tent (Simple pleasures and – bonus – no campsite fees!). Inevitably, the allotment has gone neglected, with only the occasional visit, purely for family fun.
And then there are the bees. This has been an unusually difficult bee-year, with a number of factors impacting on bee health and honey production. Starting the year with five hives (of six overwintered) I am now down to two! I’ll be nurturing these through autumn in preparation for winter: this will be the first year I’ve taken no honey off for human use: instead I’ll be leaving it all for the bees, giving them the best chance of surviving through to next spring. As ever, my granddaughter has been keen to help – with her baby brother watching (and learning) from a safe distance.
Where does the time go, eh? Five months since my previous blog-post; such a lot has happened. Time to reflect, while pondering a forwards plan. Two years since deciding to return to beekeeping (after a lapse of nearly two decades) and little more than a year since I began with my first single hive of bees, I feel I can now call myself a ‘real’ beekeeper, having ticked off a number of fundamentals on the apiarist’s learning curve:
Lost the first colony (alive and well in February; suddenly dead in March) most probably due to my own error. Consoled myself with the remaining two colonies, planning ahead for all that lovely honey to come … only to have both of these teeter towards failure in May/June, as Colony No2 turned out to be overly swarmy and Colony No3 fell victim to the site-owner’s penchant for weedkiller; double whammy. Fortunately, I had by this point (back in April/May) got all adventurous, putting into action all that I’d read about raising new colonies as ‘splits’ (one each from my two then-still prolific surviving colonies). Result: two offshoot colonies, both going strong. Thus I was able to save the two failing colonies; taking a frame of eggs from one of these ‘splits’, I combined the two failing hives together, adding in that frame of eggs, from which I hoped the bees would raise themselves a new queen. Result: two weak queenless colonies transformed into one, complete with new, healthy and productive queen, all (by July) doing well in their new shared home at my original Sennen site. 
Meanwhile, a new opportunity presented; a quiet corner of a 
Joining me on the learning curve, my granddaughter continues to enjoy visits to the bees; donning her miniature beesuit (the smallest size available) and gloves, she is confident and knowledgeable, and always happy to end a hand.
Alongside all of this I’ve been processing wax and making candles (watch this space for future details on where and how to buy), and experimenting with sowing and growing pollinator-friendly flowers, on both apiary sites and also in my garden at home. The one thing that hasn’t properly happened (yet!) is honey harvest. What with bee losses and so much change: repeating steps, backtracking, troubleshooting and restarts, taking the bees’ precious food (which they work so hard to produce) is way down on my ‘must do’ list. It is a long-shot but I’m hoping I may still get to take off some honey this season. Not impossible (still a few weeks to go yet, before the autumn wind-down) but unlikely; bottom line being that, whatever honey my bees do manage to make and store, they need it more than me. There is always next year, and in the meantime I can satisfy myself with knowing that I’ve learned a lot in this first year, and will continue to do so …
How could it not be with the past four years build-up to WWI centenary commemorations reaching their culmination on this, the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. My own direct connection to WWI (The ‘War to End All Wars’ – yeah, right.) is via my grandfather, William Frederick Wiseman, who I never met (he died three years before I was born) but know enough about to understand the horrors endured as a young soldier, injured and taken POW. It disappoints me that, in amongst the hype of ‘lest we forget’ and ‘never again’ , very little attention is being given to those who, while they may have survived bodily intact, were utterly blown apart emotionally and mentally; this devastation showing not so much physically but more in behaviour and personality; shellshock (now more accurately understood as PTSD) being a definite consequence for my grandfather, echoing down through future generations.
OK, so on closer inspection it turns out to be the wrong era; WWII as opposed to WWI; and of American origin, rather than UK. But I’m fairly certain similar principles apply both sides of ‘the pond, with agricultural practices remaining largely unchanged across the decades. Turns out honeybees played a vital role in national defence; not only in the production of food and seed but also in the manufacture and maintenance of military equipment – with 350 or more uses for 
‘Ah yes’ the smiling Customer Services assistant replied: ‘You need to have your details added to the list, and then just wait – we’ll phone you; there’s a waiting list; you’ll be number five ….’.
In such a short space of time – and with several others between me in receipt of the same – there is evidently a LOT of sugar getting spilled or simply becoming unsalable due to broken packaging. So top marks to Tesco for putting this scheme into action in collaboration with 
This lot, I discovered, must have been swept up from (I’m guessing) the bakery floor, for I found it to be riddled with flakes of (I think) pastry (or was it nuts??) … Not that this mattered, for it was no great effort to shake the whole lot through a sieve, filtering out the detritus to be left with a fine mound of perfectly usable (for bee purposes) sugar – ideal for transforming into bee syrup, which I’ve been regularly making to feed to my bees 
since around the start of September. A simple solution of sugar dissolved in hot water, allowed to cool and then stored in large plastic bottles. Easy to transport and ideal for pouring to fill the purpose-designed feeder that goes into the top of the hive, beneath the roof, where the bees very quickly get stuck in – enjoying the easily-assimilated carbohydrate as a much needed energy boost at this busy time, preparing to hunker down for winter. 
I’ve even experimented by adding dried herbs to infuse the syrup for medicinal effect – a little ‘insider tip’ from an experienced beekeeper friend, adding variable combinations of lavender, sage, thyme and rosemary – all of which I grow in my garden and store dried for kitchen use.
SomewhereinwestCornwall 