Microscopes and Melissopalynology... what does a pollen grain look like?

Before ‘hayfever season’ begins, and while there is still frost on the ground, let’s talk about pollen. Pollen is a key component of bees’ lives, so we find it an interesting topic to research. It’s often seen
on the legs of our foraging bees, and our cats who come in from the garden in the spring and
summer with a fine dusting of it on their fur. Plus, of course, anyone sensitive to it will begin to
sneeze and/or get itchy eyes.

Pollen is vital to our world; every year thousands of different species of plants produce millions of
pollen grains. These are designed to be specifically distributed to reach their female counterparts
and so help proliferate the species. Thanks to Robert Hooke who invented the compound
microscope at the end of the 17 th century, the true nature of pollen was seen for the first time, and
instead of it simply being a fine dust, the grains could be individually identified. 

When is honey too wet?

This year has been unusually wet and as a result has caused lots of problems for beekeepers and especially for commercial honey producers. The problem was one of timing – the flowers blossomed but the rain also fell, meaning that by the time the bees could fly out, all the nectar had been washed out or the flowers had died off. The extra humidity has meant too that honey this year is proving to be too ‘wet’. The rule of thumb is that the moisture content of honey must not exceed 18%. 

Busy Buzzies!

Without a doubt, September is our busiest beekeeping month – there is so much to do! Don’t get me wrong, Spring wasn’t particularly idle; we had our work cut out managing swarm behaviour and ensuring our colonies were healthy and thriving, but late summer presents other challenges.

A Dadant hive ready to harvest

The bees are very aware of the equinox and reduced hours of daylight, so the race is on to ensure they have foraged for enough nectar to turn into honey for their winter stores. Of course, this is when we turn up, smacking our lips, ready to pinch this honey.

Problem: Too Much Honey!

We hope all our readers have been enjoying a relaxing summer without too much to think about, where all the decisions have been easy ones to make. It goes without saying that we have been as busy as our bees, checking that our colonies are healthy.  Even the very hands-off approach of just observing their comings and goings can tell us that they are doing what they are supposed to do: making more bees and making honey! We are pleased to report that our colonies are thriving and have been foraging on the abundance of nectar-rich plants in the area. For the first time since we have been beekeeping in France, we moved one of our colonies to another location to help some farmer friends with pollination. The fact that they have hundreds of hectares of sunflowers was also a deciding factor in our participation in ‘transhumence’. It’s an activity carried out by many commercial beekeepers, where hives are moved to different areas so that pollination is improved and different types of honey can be produced. Our colonies usually provide us with ‘miel de fleurs’, mixed flower honey, as we grow lots of different plants, but the colony that we have moved will be making sunflower honey, a first for us.

Helianthus By Any Other Name

Sunflowers are everywhere in this part of France, a wonderful show of bright yellow that heralds the long summer days and has beekeepers rubbing their hands in anticipation of a bumper harvest of the well-known granular honey. Without wishing to dampen the mood too much, sunflowers are also a vivid reminder of the current situation in Ukraine as they are the country’s national flower. The sunflower, soniashnyk in Ukrainian, is also the symbol of the resistance movement against the invasion by Russia.

Sweetness and Light

 We could all do with some of the above in our lives, as another difficult year comes to an end, and whether you’re a honey-lover or not, it’s sometimes surprising to realise how intertwined human society is with bees and honey. The Egyptians in 3000BC adopted the bee as a sign of mankind’s ingenuity, a symbol of power, industry and production, and Cleopatra is said to have used honey as part of her beauty routine. Bees are reputed to have settled on the lips of Plato, indicating his future brilliance with words, and similarly, a swarm of bees is said to have gathered on baby Ambrose’s face, leaving behind a drop of honey. Ambrose became a bishop in fourth-century Milan who encouraged monks to use the bees’ chaste hard-working life as a model for their own.

Bees and honey have been part of music, poetry (many of us can recite the first verse of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ by Edward Lear!), architecture, art, philosophy, politics and religion for thousands of years, so it’s no wonder these days we have such an affinity with them. We used honey long before sugar, in ceremonies and celebrations, for healing and for mead. The idea of honey now has the sweetest of associations, its flavours evoking thoughts of summer days and the sound of bees buzzing between flowers in the sunshine.  AA Milne was on to something when he created the best known honey-lover in fiction, Winnie-the-Pooh. Thankfully, nowadays, we have safer, more efficient ways of harvesting honey; I don’t fancy just sticking my paw into a hive and scooping out what I can!