Harvest Festival

After weeks of high temperatures and blazing sunshine, autumn has suddenly arrived. We still have clear blue skies but it's goose-pimply chilly and flip-flops have been replaced with socks and boots, perfect for crunching through all the golden leaves that have appeared on the ground. Time to see what the bees have been up to...

In the past month we removed around half of the honey-filled frames from our hives, leaving the rest for the bees as winter stores, and managed to extract around 30kg of sweet amber nectar. Slicing the pure white wax cappings from the frames and watching the honey spool silently into the settling tank was a magical moment; we felt humble in the face of our bees' hard work, knowing that a single bee produces only a teaspoonful of honey in its lifetime.  We put the sticky honey-drained frames outside for the bees to clean, along with the wax cappings, and after an hour or so were able to retrieve completely dry wax and frames to store away until Spring. We also cut some pure honeycomb, so delicious on toast!

Beeswax can be used for many purposes, but I decided to make some salve with it, given how many minor cuts, scratches and insect bites we seem to gather between us. Earlier in the summer I had infused sunflower oil with dried calendula petals, and so I melted some of the cleaned beeswax into the vibrant orange liquid, then poured the mixture into small pots and left it to solidify. Hey presto, the result was a pure salve perfect for chapped lips, skin rashes, burns, bites etc.

We rewarded the bees with a few litres of sugar syrup to feed them up in preparation for the winter months, and to ensure that, despite our plundering, their stores are adequate to see them through to next year.

Given how well our courgettes did this summer, we decided to dig an even bigger veggie patch and are now planning what we can grow in it - leeks, rhubarb, beetroot, carrots and parsnips get my vote (garlic can also be planted now but as I'm allergic to it, that's a big thumbs-down!). Tomatoes and potatoes have done exceptionally well in grow-bags (and were easy to move around and harvest in this way) so we'll repeat those next year too - we'll be living on ratatouille and mash this winter! It appears that we are making headway towards living the good life; now I just have to work on achieving a bottom like Felicity Kendall's....