Wealden Times | WT188 | October 2017 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Jane Howard’s
Fables from the Farm
Jane contemplates the rather gruelling life of a bee
This is definitely my favourite
time of year. I love the sense
of getting ready for the winter
months while still enjoying some
wonderful warm autumnal weather.
And few pastimes are more enjoyable
than picking blackberries. However, I’m
never quite so enthused about using
them once I’ve gathered them in. None
of the tribe seem to want crumble
anymore and, despite best efforts – I
even bought a sugar thermometer – my
bramble jelly remains resolutely slack.
But maybe that’s because I’m not taking
the harvesting seriously enough.
There is a wonderful
book, first published in
1954 by Dorothy Hartley,
Food in England, full of
recipes, anecdotes, wit
and wisdom in which she
goes to great lengths to
explain how to get the best
from your brambles. Gripping reading,
honestly... “In early September the
lowest berry of each cluster swells and
ripens alone, these are the largest and
sweetest berries and should be enjoyed
raw. Go back later in the month to
pick the next in the bunch to ripen,
the secondary berries, these are less
juicy but the best ones for jam. And
if you haven’t had enough by then,
you can go again in October for the
last of the crop to ripen but they will
be smaller, have many more seeds
in proportion to pulp and are only
“a colony will have
to fly the equivalent
of three times
round the world
to fill one jar”
good for mixing with apples in pies
and crumbles.” So there you have it!
So the runny jam has been made and
now sits in serried ranks on the pantry
shelf alongside the freshly spun honey
which is especially delicious this year
because we had so many flowers in
what was an exceptionally dry spring
and early summer – remember?
In effect the bees have also been
filling their larders in preparation for
winter. In July, there would have been
about 50,000 worker bees – the girls
– in the hive plus a queen and some
males known as drones. The workers
spend their days flying
from flower to flower
collecting nectar and
bringing it back to
the hive. Each journey
produces enough nectar
to fit on a pin head
and a colony will have
to fly the equivalent of three times
round the world to fill one jar. When
they arrive back, home-based bees take
it from them and plaster it liberally
around the walls of empty honeycomb
cells. This allows the water to
evaporate and once the content is down
to about 17%, the honey is scraped
up and put into one cell and capped
over with a wax seal where it will last
for eternity – they found perfectly
good honey in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
There is only one queen in the hive
and, far from being regal and in-charge,
she is basically no more than an egg
laying machine. Her life starts like
any other bee, as an ordinary egg, but
she is fed on royal jelly and is reared
in a special cell for 16 days when she
emerges in her full glory. She then
makes a single ‘virgin flight’ (bees have
been doing it long before Richard
Branson got in on the act) where she
meets up with the drones from other
colonies and is mated with enough
sperm to allow her to lay up to a million
eggs. She usually lasts in the hive for
three years and will be kept warm
and fed over the winter by the worker
bees tucking into their honey stores.
No such luck for the boys! The
drones are tolerated all summer
as they hang around waiting for a
passing virgin queen, but as all that
business only happens in the good
weather, time comes there are no
more virgins and they are no longer
required. In Bee World there are no
passengers, no full pantry beckons
and rather gruesomely they are
driven out of the hive, stung and one
wing is chewed off. Not so sweet.
Follow Jane Howard – and the farm
– on Instagram @coopersfarm
freeimages.com/thomasfleenor
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