Luff’s Meadow Honey

This was a great talk to return to after our summer break. Martina Hendry talked about honey bees and honey production in front of an enthusiastic audience. Her talk was very entertaining and informative, covering pollinating insects and their importance for our environment and food production, how we can encourage and protect them in our gardens, and how honey is produced within the hive.

There are approximately 60,000 bees in a bee colony all looking after a single queen who lays 2000 eggs a day! By adding enzymes to the collected pollen they make honey which they then fan with their wings to reduce its water content by 75% before sealing it with wax and storing it for winter. The reason your runny honey sometimes crystallises is because it still has pollen in it. Martina was keen for us to learn about the advantages of local honey producers’ honey with it’s traces of local pollen over supermarket honey, which can be a blend of honeys imported from across the world and meticulously strained so that we cannot identify the food sources.

There were plenty of interesting questions from the audience before we stopped for refreshments and tasting. She had bought along a wide range of unusual honeys from around the world, my favourites were the Albanian chestnut honey and an intriguing honey blended with cocoa powder!