St. Patrick’s Day cupcakes
Busy As A Bee
Monday August 10th 2009
With rain clouds brewing we donned our protective clothing and with mixed feelings approached the group of apiaries that contained our coveted Regent’s Park honey. Not without reason were we cautious, since with poor weather all day the bees were not happily buzzing around collected nectar and eating, but were staying at home in their hives and munching on the honey they had already laid down.
Toby Mason, the beekeeper who looks after 40 hives, two of which are now owned by Harbour & Jones, explained that his chosen Queen bees shipped over from New Zealand were prized for their gentle nature. With all the bees in the hives sisters or at least half sisters we were pretty much guaranteed a lot of bee activity without any sting in the tail.
After prizing off the lids, some which were glued down with propolis, he gently inspected the brood boxes and we took a peek ourselves. We were fascinated to hear how the bees carefully laid down their honey on the hexagonal frames and we got to see first-hand the frames starting to fill up and ooze with rich coloured flower-scented honey, covered with a protective wax layer. It was equally surprising to hear that the colonies are made up predominantly of females with a few males that are “chucked out” at the end of the year! After inspecting a few frames we were lucky enough to spot the larger, distinctly gold and black striped Queen herself, tended to by her workers.
It was an exciting and educational experience for our chefs to realise that what they saw before them would shortly, weather permitting, be extracted, organically filtered and then neatly packaged to arrive at our sites ready for eager team & customers alike to taste the first batch of our H & J honey this year & guess what our busy bees had been feasting on!
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