Went on a bee "course" today, run by Lynda from Woodside Apiary and hosted by A. from Ham Island. I've met A. before, in a past life when I used to carriage drive. It was actually seeing A's chickens that inspired me to get chickens as pets, and I was pleased to see her today to be able to tell her this.
Anyway. Course was excellent. Some of it consolidated or reconfirmed what we had already learned, and some of it was a refresher on things we had covered on our formal courses but hadn't really needed to think about. And some of it was stiff we just hadn't needed to think about in detail before - like how do you filter your extracted honey, and how is it best to store it, and what do you do if you have oil seed rape honey that you haven't taken off, and how do you make creamed honey and and and.
We tasted lots of different types of honey, including honey which had fermented, and honey which was made from ivy.
What was also very helpful was being able to inspect A's hives and compare them and contrast them to ours. From the things Lynda talked about, we were able to deduce what had actually been going on in our hive in the last week or so ( things I haven't got round to blogging. Later in the day we were able to talk about the situation, and what we now thought we would do as a result of today's learnings, and we came up with an action plan.
So, Monday will be a busy day.
Anyway. Course was excellent. Some of it consolidated or reconfirmed what we had already learned, and some of it was a refresher on things we had covered on our formal courses but hadn't really needed to think about. And some of it was stiff we just hadn't needed to think about in detail before - like how do you filter your extracted honey, and how is it best to store it, and what do you do if you have oil seed rape honey that you haven't taken off, and how do you make creamed honey and and and.
We tasted lots of different types of honey, including honey which had fermented, and honey which was made from ivy.
What was also very helpful was being able to inspect A's hives and compare them and contrast them to ours. From the things Lynda talked about, we were able to deduce what had actually been going on in our hive in the last week or so ( things I haven't got round to blogging. Later in the day we were able to talk about the situation, and what we now thought we would do as a result of today's learnings, and we came up with an action plan.
So, Monday will be a busy day.
