Good morrow Dear Reader.
I hope the sun has risen with you and your hay rick is rat free, your cow is managing to keep producing milk from her one remaining udder from the dried straw you've been feeding her over the 'driest summer since '76' and your well hasn't run dry just yet.
Why the evocation of days gone by ? Well it does seem to me that with every passing day we appear to be coming closer to calamity day, judgement day, call it what you will. Electricity being the item foremost on my mind, as I use the stuff to extract honey, warm wax, steam clean frames, warm honey to bottle it and do a lot of this by the light of a bulb. How in the name of all that's holy will an 'average' family of 4 be able to pay, from after tax income, a fuel bill of £3.5/£4.5/£5.5k over the coming year when they are used to paying (a fair price) £500-£750 a year for their energy needs.
Even if we decided to stop supporting the Ukrainians in the war (and I'm not supporting that for one minute) the sanctions would remain and the price of gas on the world market would remain stubbornly high as long as the Nord Stream pipeline remained closed, and other pipelines diverted to 'favourable' countries. And one doesn't just build an ACME unfolding nuclear power station like they do in the cartoons do they ??
I was talking to my father when he was helping on a honey stall at the weekend (helping is actually pushing it - he had accompanied my mother to the event so he and she could go on a river trip and he was merely resting his legs in a folding camping chair at the back of my stall) and he said that for the past 40 years - as long as he'd been married (actually its 56 years but who's counting) he and mum had said we needed an energy policy that didn't pander to the CND (at the time) and the non-nuclear brigade and we should have built two new reactors for every one coming to the end end of it's life using the British designed PWR reactors that were proven and safe. I have to say I couldn't agree more.
Then a chance conversation in the week with an elderly ex-engineer who had a good rant about the anti-fracking brigade saying that they (and the media) conveniently (or ignorantly) ignored the fact that north sea oil was largely extracted using the same technique after the initial surge of oil flowing from a new well. The fact you have to 'force' it from the ground using a method not unlike hydraulic fracturing, and has been done safely for 50+ years, has been completely overlooked.
Going back to my own energy use - having had more than my fair share of troubles extracting this season (two broken extractor speed controllers) and a bee shed that is increasingly not bee proof as the wood warps and flexes with age, resulting in many midnight oil burning sessions to extract the next batch of supers, my mind was cast back to the 'old days' when honey wasn't spun, it was cut into squares and put into oil cloth and packaged in little cardboard boxes (no polythene cases or windows then) or the entire crop was crushed and strained using, one presumes, muslin or sacking, and bottled in early glass bottles with cork lids, all during the day in a lean-to full of robbing bees (no electricity to work by night) and then a big fire and cauldron to boil down and melt the wax for candles and industry.
I sometimes wonder when people hark back to the 'good old days' whether they were 'as good' for beekeepers anyway. I know I'd rather have a proper extraction system that can spin a few supers at a time in a bee-free environment and have the ability to warm/strain honey as required into clean glass jars with secure lids or buckets for longer term storage. I certainly wouldn't want the faff of rendering just wild comb, even if it were from just a few hives (skeps) and wonder how some of these 'modern' natural beekeepers put up with the inevitable mess, and lets face it, waste of honey, in the processing of the comb.
I suppose the only benefit is they do it in the spring after their colony has died out and they render some honey from some dark combs left in the hives so the bees won't find the honey....
On the stall yesterday a 'know it all' 'the bbka says it isn't allowed' beekeeper who has 3 hives said I can't label my honeycomb (sections and cut comb) as 'Raw' or the chunk honey as 'Raw'. (even though neither product is strained or processed in the conventional way). I said I could do with it as I liked as it nicely surmised the state of the comb, and I didn't claim other run/set jarred honey was 'raw' as that had been through more filtering etc etc. Her lips pursed and I could tell she would be 'having conversations' with well known local beekeepers in her group as she name checked them. I couldn't give a scoobies...This year I've seen and heard more absolute codswallop and utter excrement being spouted by ever more 'experts' who've 'done all the exams' and then it transpires that they have 2 hives and one died last year and the other has swarmed and they have managed to take 19lb of honey off the total.
Experts.
Yeah right.
Yet all the BBKA can do is raise petitions and make political rumblings and align themselves with all sorts of organisations who aren't beekeepers and simply want the beekeeping shilling to fund their own subscription services. They don't understand the real merits of beekeeping to provide pollination services or management of colonies to provide a proper surplus of honey, let alone manage the health of their bees - I shook my head in disbelief when I saw their press release about thymol earlier in the year.
As for my own season - record honey crop and still 4 apiaries to clear which I need to do before the ivy starts (it's about to burst into flower about 4 weeks early) and plans afoot for next year. Beekeeping certainly helps take your mind off the problems of the world and oneself, now if only I could get a bee-proof extraction facility sorted this week !
KR
Somerford
I hope the sun has risen with you and your hay rick is rat free, your cow is managing to keep producing milk from her one remaining udder from the dried straw you've been feeding her over the 'driest summer since '76' and your well hasn't run dry just yet.
Why the evocation of days gone by ? Well it does seem to me that with every passing day we appear to be coming closer to calamity day, judgement day, call it what you will. Electricity being the item foremost on my mind, as I use the stuff to extract honey, warm wax, steam clean frames, warm honey to bottle it and do a lot of this by the light of a bulb. How in the name of all that's holy will an 'average' family of 4 be able to pay, from after tax income, a fuel bill of £3.5/£4.5/£5.5k over the coming year when they are used to paying (a fair price) £500-£750 a year for their energy needs.
Even if we decided to stop supporting the Ukrainians in the war (and I'm not supporting that for one minute) the sanctions would remain and the price of gas on the world market would remain stubbornly high as long as the Nord Stream pipeline remained closed, and other pipelines diverted to 'favourable' countries. And one doesn't just build an ACME unfolding nuclear power station like they do in the cartoons do they ??
I was talking to my father when he was helping on a honey stall at the weekend (helping is actually pushing it - he had accompanied my mother to the event so he and she could go on a river trip and he was merely resting his legs in a folding camping chair at the back of my stall) and he said that for the past 40 years - as long as he'd been married (actually its 56 years but who's counting) he and mum had said we needed an energy policy that didn't pander to the CND (at the time) and the non-nuclear brigade and we should have built two new reactors for every one coming to the end end of it's life using the British designed PWR reactors that were proven and safe. I have to say I couldn't agree more.
Then a chance conversation in the week with an elderly ex-engineer who had a good rant about the anti-fracking brigade saying that they (and the media) conveniently (or ignorantly) ignored the fact that north sea oil was largely extracted using the same technique after the initial surge of oil flowing from a new well. The fact you have to 'force' it from the ground using a method not unlike hydraulic fracturing, and has been done safely for 50+ years, has been completely overlooked.
Going back to my own energy use - having had more than my fair share of troubles extracting this season (two broken extractor speed controllers) and a bee shed that is increasingly not bee proof as the wood warps and flexes with age, resulting in many midnight oil burning sessions to extract the next batch of supers, my mind was cast back to the 'old days' when honey wasn't spun, it was cut into squares and put into oil cloth and packaged in little cardboard boxes (no polythene cases or windows then) or the entire crop was crushed and strained using, one presumes, muslin or sacking, and bottled in early glass bottles with cork lids, all during the day in a lean-to full of robbing bees (no electricity to work by night) and then a big fire and cauldron to boil down and melt the wax for candles and industry.
I sometimes wonder when people hark back to the 'good old days' whether they were 'as good' for beekeepers anyway. I know I'd rather have a proper extraction system that can spin a few supers at a time in a bee-free environment and have the ability to warm/strain honey as required into clean glass jars with secure lids or buckets for longer term storage. I certainly wouldn't want the faff of rendering just wild comb, even if it were from just a few hives (skeps) and wonder how some of these 'modern' natural beekeepers put up with the inevitable mess, and lets face it, waste of honey, in the processing of the comb.
I suppose the only benefit is they do it in the spring after their colony has died out and they render some honey from some dark combs left in the hives so the bees won't find the honey....
On the stall yesterday a 'know it all' 'the bbka says it isn't allowed' beekeeper who has 3 hives said I can't label my honeycomb (sections and cut comb) as 'Raw' or the chunk honey as 'Raw'. (even though neither product is strained or processed in the conventional way). I said I could do with it as I liked as it nicely surmised the state of the comb, and I didn't claim other run/set jarred honey was 'raw' as that had been through more filtering etc etc. Her lips pursed and I could tell she would be 'having conversations' with well known local beekeepers in her group as she name checked them. I couldn't give a scoobies...This year I've seen and heard more absolute codswallop and utter excrement being spouted by ever more 'experts' who've 'done all the exams' and then it transpires that they have 2 hives and one died last year and the other has swarmed and they have managed to take 19lb of honey off the total.
Experts.
Yeah right.
Yet all the BBKA can do is raise petitions and make political rumblings and align themselves with all sorts of organisations who aren't beekeepers and simply want the beekeeping shilling to fund their own subscription services. They don't understand the real merits of beekeeping to provide pollination services or management of colonies to provide a proper surplus of honey, let alone manage the health of their bees - I shook my head in disbelief when I saw their press release about thymol earlier in the year.
As for my own season - record honey crop and still 4 apiaries to clear which I need to do before the ivy starts (it's about to burst into flower about 4 weeks early) and plans afoot for next year. Beekeeping certainly helps take your mind off the problems of the world and oneself, now if only I could get a bee-proof extraction facility sorted this week !
KR
Somerford
