4lb

In case you were wondering (and I’m sure you were), I didn’t just leave that tub of honey festering on the floor of the pantry. Well, actually, I did, but only for a couple of weeks while I got distracted by other stuff. But, finally, last weekend I did indeed get round to bottling it. I bought some nice small (4oz) jars from this place and sterilised them by putting them in a cold oven and then leaving them in there, on newspaper-covered trays, for 20 minutes or so while I raised the temperature to 130^o C.

Then I decanted the honey into each of them in turn – an impressively sticky business. I managed to fill 16 and a bit jars – in other words, a grand total of 4lb for this year’s harvest. I’m trying very hard not to compare this with my far more experienced friends in the village who managed to extract around a hundred times that amount. It was, after all, my first year, starting from a small, single colony – and a colony that swarmed halfway through the season, too.

But the most important thing is, of course, that it tastes absolutely gorgeous. There is nothing quite like eating honey produced by your own bees.