Last Rite

It could turn out to be my only opportunity to take a picture like this this year, so this is what it has to be. The honey we took from one of the colonies that has gone to the hive in the sky, which we bottled today. 9.3kg - not bad, considering the difficult spring. It is lighter, clearer and more delicate than our spring honey usually is. Perhaps it is not pure oilseed rape - the crop was more distant from the apiary than it often is, and the weather was catchy, so they may have taken more notice of closer options - the apples in the orchard, even

The slight green tinge to the glass does it no favours. We have put it in small jars - 227g, though most of them have a generous 240g, or so. 227g is an old fashioned half-pound of course; some traditions die hard. I was left with about 200g of scrapings and had run out of jars. I put it in the breakfast jar - containing last year's crystalised honey - that has almost run out, then stirred them together hard with a dessert spoon. This is a small-scale version of what beekeepers do to produce 'soft-set' honey (which used to be called 'creamed honey' until some legislator decided that it doesn't come from cows, so can't be 'creamed')

Soft-set was developed as a way of halting the crystalisation process part-way through, partly because some people prefer the softer consistency, but mainly because some honeys that crystalise fast leave a liquid, uncrystalised residue at the top of the jar. This looks a bit unsightly but, more importantly, it it has a higher water content than the original, liquid honey did, so there is a risk of it fermenting, spoiling the honey, expanding and oozing out of the jar. We have had it happen once; life gets very sticky for a while. Soft-set is much less likely to suffer the problem

I fed the surviving colony again. That's the equivalent of 6 x 1kg bags of sugar they have received in 6 days. Making wax takes a lot of energy, it is a very energy-dense substance - hence its value for candles, and the intensity of the flames, when it is burned on a fire