Fruit Mead, Melomel

Okay so I made up some mead previously, just for the sake of using up some honey rather than anything else. I've sampled it, and it's going rather well. Since then I've read a bit more about mead and discovered fruit meads. Yeah basically mead made with fruit in it. The 'proper' name for this is Melomel. The name could be from latin as mel mellis means honey and mellitus can mean honeyed or it could come from greek in which meli means honey, or perhaps some long forgotten brewer named it after his ladyfriend Melissa -I guess we'll never really know.

So fruit and mead... I was swapping a tin of beewax furniture polish for a box of apples. I'd made apple sauce with the previous box but this time I decided to try making an apple Melomel. Whilst waiting for the apples I went and bought yeast, pectolase and a few other bits I figured I'd need. I no longer had enough honey for the mead, gave most of it away lol, so on my way home popped into a supermarket to buy some more. Whilst there I spotted half price cranberries. So on a whim I bought them and decided to make a Cranberry Melomel, relegating the Apple Melomel for another day and another post. As with the mead I concocted my own recipe based on the many existing recipes floating about on the internet adapted to what was available to me. The fruit can be added before or after the primary fermentation, which ever you use affects the final flavour in different ways. I opted to add the fruit right at the start because it just sounded easier.

I purchased a kilo of cranberries but only used 500g having noticed people seem to be using less cranberry than they used other fruits. Going by other recipes I'm still using quite a lot of cranberries for the volume I'm making.

This lot will become a Cranberry Melomel

Cranberry Melomel Ingredients
1.36 KG Honey -four jars of Tesco's cheapest is adequate I reckon
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 pack of yeast
500g Cranberries
2.292 Kg sugar (I was going to use 2KG but had a bag to finish off)
One teabag
Packet of yeast
1/4 teaspoon of yeast nutrient
5 litres of water -I didn't use all five, when the demijohn's full enough just stop adding it -this isn't rocket science...
1 teaspoon of pectolase

I boiled up the cranberries with the sugar in some of the water in one pan and in another heated some more of the water with the honey to dissolve it. To get as much honey as I could from the jars after pouring them into the pan I filled them with water and left them a while before pouring that out into the pan with the too. I also steeped a teabag in a little water whilst this was going on. The more surface area of the fruit available the better so once the cranberries had softened I got out my hand blender, dipped it in and turned it on to liquidise them.

Blending the Cranberries
-WTF? Another picure without any bees in it!?

That done and all the honey dissolved in the other pan I ladled the contents of both pans into the demijohn via a funnel along with the tea I'd made. To help mix it all up I alternated a ladle of one with a ladle of the other. Then after letting it cool enough that it hopefully wouldn't kill the yeast I poured a little water into a bowl, warmed it in the microwave briefly then dropped the yeast and a teaspoon of yeast nutrient into it along with a teaspoon of pectolase. -Cranberries are high in pectin and pectolase  is an enzyme that breaks this down. Gave it a shake to mix it all up, slapped in a bung and airlock then sat the demijohn to ferment out of the way. It looks like a demijohn full of blood.

Demijohn full of gore

I originally used some bread yeast in this batch but a couple of days later after reading up on alcohol tolerancess of yeasts I added some wine yeast too. The main difference between wine and bread yeasts seems to be the level of alcohol tolerance, bread yeast which will probably have a lower alcohol tolerance than a wine yeast will and so die out when the alcohol is content is relatively low whereas the wine yeast should carry on making alcohol far longer giving you a stronger drink. In theory one yeast will eventually dominate the must and I'm assuming it's going to be the one with the higher alcohol tolerance.

When I made mead before I boiled the must but there seems to be mixed ideas about the merits of boiling the honey pror to using it. Obviously boiling will kill the majority of bacteria in the must however it's unlikely there's going to be any in the honey anyway what with it being hygroscopic and all -meaning any bacteria or yeast trying to set up house in it is going to die of dehydration pretty sharpish. The downside is that this boiling may loose some of the properties of the honey we want to keep -although brewers seem a little vague about what these are referring to flavours and aromas rather than chemical constituents. I did boil the cranberries and their sugar up as I although I'd washed them I'd still expect some bacteria to be hanging out on them.

I didn't use as much of the water as I'd expected as I hadn't really given any thought to the volume of the honey (D'oh!) and the cranberries themselves will have also taken up a lot of volume too. After a couple of days I could see tiny bubbles rising as the yeast does it's thing converting sugars to alcohol.When the fermentation was in full flow I could see the pulpy part of the fruit moving to the top of the liquid. This can form a cap causing CO2 and heat to build up under it which isn't particularly good for the yeast, and it can go mouldy, so whilst this was happening I was giving it a bit of a swirl on a daily basis to dissipate it.

After 2 weeks the bubbling slowed to about one every 3 or 4 seconds so I decided to remove the fruit pulp. For this I just poured it through a seive into a funnel in the top of the empty 5 litre waterbottle, cleaned out the demijohn and popped it all back in again. This isn't the best way though as it means the liquid gets more aereated than you'd want. I also topped up the liquid level with some springwater and now the liquid is bubbling away again without the cap of fruit matter on top

As I poured it through the seive I noticed there was some stuff the consistency of jam so I added another teaspoon of pectolase whilst I was at it. I actually gave the liquid a taste as I reracked it and can report it tasted excellent but semed more like a port tye thing than than a wine drink. This may change as I rerack it to remove sediment and add a little more water each time and the yeast continue to turn the suger to alcohol. Now I'm going to leave it a couple of weeks in the corner of a room before reracking it with the syphon to remove it from the sediment -or lees as they're called. If I read it correctly the sediment is dead yeast and can affect the flavour of the finished product if the mead is left in with it for too long.

A note on demijohn's for the more thrifty out there.The water I used came in a 5 litre bottle from for £1. The bottle is food grade plastic and can be used just like a glass demijohn.Ok so it may not be as aesthetically pleasing as glass vessel but it's more or less free and probably a bit more robust if pressure builds up in it than a glass one would be. Just get an airlock grommet from a homebrew supplier, drill a hole in the lid and stick an airlock on. In fact whilst looking for the grommet online I found homebrew suppliers selling the same bottle but with different colour lid and handle as a plastic demijohn for considerably morea than I paid for this one full of water.

Beeswax Polish

Since deciding to start beekeeping I've found there's a lot of peripheral activity which doesn't directly involve being up to your elbows in colonies of eusocial stinging insects. Aside from heavy lifting, cleaning, sterilising, and more heavy lifting there's carpentry (of a sort), extracting honey and wax, cooking syrups and fondants for the bees, paying attention to the weather, and now to the list I'm going to add polish making. Having extracted and filtered my beeswax I'd originally planned to swap it for new foundation, but later decided to try doing something else with it instead..

Basically there's a huge number of uses for beeswax, if the mood takes you you can use it to make chapsticks, handcreme, moisturiser, soap, lip gloss and a load of other personal care type stuff -however I don't wear lipgloss and I'm seriously not about to launch my own line of cosmetics. Traditionally beeswax has been used to make candles since the year dot, however this is the 21st century and I don't burn that many candles in a year. Another thing people use beeswax for is making polish. And it turns out it's actually really easy. Just dissolve an amount of beeswax in an equal amount of turpentine and that's it. You can alter the ratio of turpentine to wax to make the final polish softer (more turpentine) or harder (less turpentine) and you can add canuba wax to make it easier to use.

I worked out that three of my beeswax bars was half a litre of wax (lucky) and purchased a half litre of pure turpentine -it has to be real turpentine though, none of that turpentine substitute or white spirits malarky. I was pleasantly surprised to find real turpentine doesn't give you the banging headache and nausea that the substitutes and white spirits tend to, which is a positive when you're heating a jar of the stuff in your kitchen. An obvious point to note here is that turpentine and wax are both pretty flammable substances and so there's an inherent risk in heating them up. In fact when I did firebreathing I ruled out turps as a fuel because I felt it was too flammable to use safely, insofar as exhaling a cloud of burning fuel is ever going to be safe -don't try that at home kids it'll probably kill you. So, anyone who wants to follow these steps bear in mind that you do so entirely at your own risk and when they pull your charred remains from the burnt out ruin of what was your house I take no responsibility

All you need to make polish

To speed the process up a bit it's best to melt the wax first. Of course the wax blocks wouldn't fit in my jar. Turns out it's actually quite hard to cut up blocks of beeswax, people talk about using a hot blade or wire but I suspect that's based more on theory than practice and you'd actually need a really hot blade with a built in heat source to do the job and it'd probably just set again once the blade had passed through anyway. I gather the easiest way is to grate the stuff, but I persevered with a large knife and cut the bars up just enough to cram them into a large jar.

Beeswax, still looking a lot like fudge.

I then stood the large jar in a pan of boiling water -yep an improvised baine marie. As I mentioned earlier wax is pretty flammable stuff so it's best not heated directly, unless you have a burning desire for the company of firemen anyway. Once it had started to melt I popped the jar lid on (it's a Sarsons Pickling Vinegar jar if you really want to know) and leaned the jar on it's side to reduce the amount of contact it had with the pan's bottom, I really didn't fancy the company of firemen at all.

Molten Wax and Turpentine

Once melted I added the turpentine, stuck some plastic under the lid, swirled it around, turned off the flame and left it sitting in the hot water whilst the turpentine dissolved the wax and I watched The Big Bang Theory, which was jolly entertaining. I reheated it a little bit afterwards but then got a big bored and decided to pour it into the tins. You can get polish tins from various beekeeping supply shops and I'd got ten from Thornes. They hold 100ml which worked out just right for my litre of polish.

One litre of freshly made furniture polish

I used heavy gardening gloves to hold the hot jar and a funnel to pour it into the tins. Didn't really fancy trying to clean up spilt polish so I placed the jars on a tray -luckily there were no accidents anyway. When it had cooled to a uniform pale beigey sort of colour I decided to test it out. Rather than starting a tin I scraped off some of the polish cooling on the side of the jar. I soon realised I don't really have much unvarnished or unlacquered wooden in the house to test it with and wound up applying it to the first thing that came to hand which was the wooden handle of a machette I use for green coconuts. It sees a lot of use in the garden and the kitchen (as multitools go a decent machete is a lot more useful than a pocketfull of Swiss Army Knife) so the handle needed a little attention after a couple of years use and exposure to water and various food related liquids. The polish was very soft I smeared it onto the wood, left it half an hour whilst I had a frothy coffee and unsuccessfully attempted to engage the cat in a conversation about our differing philosophical standpoints. After this I let the cat out, she wasn't very conversational anyway, and using a some kitchen roll removed the excess wax and buffed up the remainder with a polishing cloth leaving the wood looking better than it ever did when the tool had arrived brand spanking new from some wierdo online survivalist supply shop.

New polish

The really difficult bit was coming up with a label. I ordered some round labels from a stationers on tinternet who also supplied a template for label design. I fired up G.I.M.P. for Windows, an excellent free image editing package, and started faffing about with fonts and images till I wound up with something I liked. Getting it printed onto the labels themselves was a bit hit and miss. I'm not sure if that was the fault of the labels themselves or my five year old HP Photosmart 3010, either way for every six labels printed per sheet I seemed to get four good ones. The last thing to do was slap the labels onto the tin lids.

First batch of Beeswax Polish

Between typing up all that and publishing the post I ordered some more tins and turpentine and turned the rest of the wax into 33 more tins of  polish. I decided I wasn't happy with the bee on the original label so made a few changes and redited the image. The bee isn't really anatomically correct, but I think it'll do for now.

Finalised label art

Finally happy with my label and out of beeswax I now need to find some buyers for 43 tins of polish. Actually I've already bartered one for some windfallen apples so that's one down and 42 to go..

Fondant for Winter

Well after the other night's freeze it's warmed up a little and the pond has unfrozen for a while. Still too cold to give the bees anymore syrup though. Provided the bees have stored enough food for the winter they can now be left alone to eat it. If they have't got eough food stored yet you can still feed them. What I'm planning to do carry on feeding them untill they stop taking anymore food. It's too cold for syrup now, so it's time for some solid food. The solid food for bees is fondant. Yep, christmas cake icing.

It's easy enough to make: just 6 lb of sugar and 1 pint of water add a teaspoon of cream of tartar and boil till melted. It's quite nasty stuff if you get it on you as it sticks like glue and stay hot for a long time.

Making fondant. Don't get it on you.

Once melted you need to whisk it up to get some air into it. I popped it into my trusty food mixer, a handed down Kenwood machine that doesn't see much use. As the fondant gets more air in it and cools it becomes harder for the machine (or you) to whisk and before finishing my batch it burnt out the motor on my blender. Oops. I used a hand blender to finish the batch which seemed to do okay. I then spooned the white gunk into some cleaned takeaway food boxes.

It's not mashed potato.

The finished product looks a lot like mashed potato. I made these last month and left them in the fridge till they were needed. When I cut the space board insulation for the tops of the hives I made a hole for the fondant boxes to go in.

Dinner is served.

The fondant goes onto the crownboard over the feeding hole and a half depth of the insulation goes over that to keep the heat in. It's not airtight so some heatloss probably still occurs but the bees can glue it down round the edges if they feel the need.

Bees of Hive1 and Hive2 enjoying some nutritious candy.

The bees in Hive1 started eating their fondant from one end of the box, whereas those in Hive2 started from the middle which as they progressed gave them more surface area to nibble. Today I replaced the boxes with new ones and was able to see that whilst Hive2 only had a little fondant left from the the corners of the boxes whilst Hive1 had about a third left. When I checked them today I lit the smoker just in case but didn't smoke the hives -better to have the smoke avaiable if i needed it than not available if I needed it. The bees in Hive1 remained in their cluster whilst I removed the box and popped a new on in it's place, looking in the hole I could see them moving about a bit but they didn't seem in a hurry to come and meet me. I had set the smoker down nearer to Hive1 than 2 so it may have been that they managed to detect the smoke I guess. Hive2 was a different story, they were very active and I had to drop their new box on in a hurry as they started to come meet me. One managed to fly out before I got the box in place. There was about 8 or 9 dead bees outside the mouse guard of Hive1 which I flicked away from the entrance. I think they're probably dead bees that the colony pushed out, in the summer they'ed normally carry the dead bees out and drop them off away from the hive. During winter given the number of bees that do die off there's a good chance that dead bees dropping from the cluster to the floor can build up enough to block the entrance so it's good practice to get a wire and now and then poke it through the mouseguard holes to clear the way.

It's Freezing

Cold weather in the UK in December isn't really newsworthy, I know. However it's something new for my bees so I felt it blogworthy. Last night the temperature in Kingston-Upon-Hull hit zero degrees celcius and the wildlife pond in the middle of the garden froze. It's still frozen and I expect it'll remain so for a long time. The other one in the corner wasn't iced over today but I don't think I'll be hopping in to test the temperature anytime soon.

Frozen pond

As I said this is the first winter for my bees. Given the normal lifespan of a bee the only bee in a colony likely to live through more than one winter is the Queen but both of mine were born this year so it's a first for them too. Today I had a look under the hives with my trusty BeeSpy 3000 but there wasn't really much to see. So I went back inside and returned with my stethoscope. Doesn't everyone have a stethoscope? Putting this to the hive wall I was able to hear the bees merrily buzzing inside. They sounded a happy bunch and knowing they're still alive makes me a happy chap too. Of course there's a lot can happen between now and Spring and a lot of colonies don't make it so fingers crossed.

Something else I've just had to do is check the levels of varroa in the hives. I previously treated the mites with a course of Apilife Var in October but no treatment gets rid of all of them and in the hives of the complacent beekeeper they can rebuild their population. So first thing to do was check the numbers mites still in the hives. Both hives have wire mesh floors so mites that fall, or die drop out of the hive. To check the number of mites we monitor the number of them that fall out. Because beekeepers like to name things this is called "mite fall" fairly self explanatory name really. To measure mite fall you place something sticky under the hive and, hopefully, when a mite falls through wire mesh floor it'll be stuck there when you come to count them later. I used greaseproof paper sellotaped to correx boards and smeared with petroleum jelly.

Setting a trap for Varroa Destructor

After a few days with the sticky paper in place there were no mites visible on them at all. That doesn't mean there's no Varroa in the hives, it just means there's probably not enough of them at present to need further treatment. If there had been the treatment would have been to drizzle the bees with a 3.2% Oxacylic Acid solution. 5ml of the stuff between each frame where the bees are. Sounds pretty harsh pouring acid onto your bees doesn't it? It kills something like 97% of the mites, and whilst it has a negative effect on the bees too it's believed to be far less harmful than the impact of the Varroa themselves.

The Drones

The Drones were a mancunian punk band in the late seventies. In 1977 they released a 7" bearing the songs Bone Idol and I Just Wanna Be Myself. In the 80's a mate of mine bought a second hand copy of this at a market someplace and I still have a recording of it on a C90 somewhere, unfortunately I don't own a cassette player anymore so it's unlikely I'll be listening to them in the near future. They knocked out two studio albums and appeared on a couple of compilations before fading into obscurity so you can be forgiven for not having heard of them prior to reading this, shame really as Bone Idol was a pretty decent song and I'd've liked to have heard a bit more from them. Anyway this entry isn't really about them. It's about the other drones, male bees.

Looking at the comb over summer it was easy to spot several larger looking bees ambling about amongst the workers. I'm sure I'm not the first new beekeeper to have spotted a drone and thought it was the queen only to then see another five happily wandering about on the same frame and realise it's not her.

Workers and Drones on new foundation.

The drones are the two larger ones in the picture. Apart from being bigger than the workers they have a wider thorax and the abdomen has a rounded end whereas the worker bees are more pointy and wasplike. Whilst not quite so visible in the image drones have huge eyes extending from the sides of the head right over the top whereas workers have smaller ones on the sides of their heads. The reason for the drones' huge eyes are so that they can spot queen bees on mating flights. As the name suggests they make a very loud noise as they fly -well loud for a bee anyway.

Worker and Drone

The above pair were happy to pose together so we can compare the worker (on the left) and the drone (on the right). You can see the top of the drone's head is covered with it's compound eyes so it appears to be wearing a little bifurcated helmet. Honeybees actually have five eyes, the two large compound eyes that you can easily see and then three very small simple eyes in the middle of the head. The simple eyes seem to measure light levels. You can also see the worker has an abdomen tapering to a pointy end which houses a sting whereas the male has a very rounded end with some fuzzy hair just visible in the image. There's no sting on the drone. You can also make out that the legs are different on the drone to the worker, they're longer on the drone, presumably for hanging onto the Queen during matin.

The role drones play in a bee colony remains something of a mystery. They have some obvious jobs to do but  most of the time they just appear to be a burden on resrouces. Drones don't forage, they don't make wax, they don't draw wax, they don't feed larvae, they don't clean the hive, they don't do door security, it appears that they don't really do a lot -they don't even feed themselves if they can help it! Their most obvious role is mating with queen bees, given the number of queen bees in a normal colony (one) compared to the number of drones (a few hundred) the odds are seriously stacked against any individual drone ever performing this task -which may be just as well as they die with a ruptured abdomen shortly afterwards anyway. They quite probably have other roles that we just don't understand at present. What is known is that bee colonies seem to want to have a contingent of drones in their numbers. It has been suggested that given their larger size and noisy flight they may act as decoys to birds and other predators when a colony swarms. A potential predator seeing a swarm will probably go with the biggest fattest looking bee in the swarm which without the drones would be the queen. So perhaps the drone is a self sacrificing decoy. The loud noise they make could also be to attract predators.

To mate drone bees from different colonies go to congration areas, how they find them is quite a mystery bearing in mind that no drone lives longer than a single season so there's nobody passing the location along to next year's drones. Anyway the guys hang out at these congregation sites waiting for a queen. Eventually a virgin queen will emerge from a colony and fly over to the congregation zone too -maybe she hears the drone's noise? Once there she'll mate with about 17 drones, somehow they avoid mating with any from their own colony -no inbred two headed, three legged bees for us thanks. The reward for drones who have successfully mated with a Queen is a fatal ruptured abdomen, the queen goes back to her colony to spend the rest of her life in the dark laying eggs.

Drones that haven't mated live happily in the hive till it gets a little cooler at which point the worker bees stop feeding them and drive them out into the cold to die of hunger and exposure. Either way it's not a happy ending for the drone.

It's a bit of a mystery how the bees decide how may drones they need but it's something the worker bees seem to dictate rather than the queen. I read somewhere that a typical strong colony has between 400 and 600 drones. As drones are bigger they need slightly larger cells in the honeycomb. When the workers want drones they will make the larger comb if there is room but if there isn't the space they'll tear down some existing comb to make the larger cells. As the queen bee lays her eggs in empty cells she'll normally lay an egg in a worker cell and fertilise it which makes the egg female, when she reaches a  larger drone cell she lays an egg and doesn't bother to to fertilise it leaving it with half a set of chromosomes. Wierd eh? This will then hatch into a drone.

Normally drones make up a small portion of the colony population, however sometimes things go wrong and drone  numbers increase. Sometimes a queen will start laying only or mostly drones -this is called a 'drone laying queen' and can be rectified by removing the queen (squish!) and replacing her with a new one. The other instance when a drone population will increase is when there is no queen and worker bees start laying eggs. Worker bees never get to mate so their eggs are never fertilised which means theirs always hatch into drones. At this stage the colony is pretty much knackered and the normal thing to do is empty the colony on the ground in the hope that non laying workers will find their way into other existing hives to bump up their workforce.

Worker cells above, drone cells below.

As the drones have bigger cells this makes them useful in the fight against the Varroa Destructor mite. The mite's prefer to lay their eggs in drone cells as there's more room ion the cell and a bigger larvae for the mites to feed on. Beekeepers can take advantage of this by encouraging the bees to make drone comb on a specific frame then when the drone larvae in their cells have been capped to begin the metamorphosis into actual bees the keeper can take away the comb and all the mites it contains. This is a technique usually referred to as "Sacrificial Drones" or "Sacrificial Drone Comb" as basically the developing drones are sacrificed to cull the mites.

Whilst the workers will tear out worker cells to make drone comb they can also be directed to make drone cells where the beekeeper can more easily access them. It's very simple to do. The beekeeper places at one end of the brood box a frame of foundation which is only half the height of the brood box. The bees then make their new drone comb hanging from the bottom of this frame.

Drone comb being made underneath a shallow frame.

This means that not only can the beekeeper easily locate the drone comb but it can be easily removed. Once removed it goes into the freezer to kill the larvae and the mites alike so they can later be counted giving the keeper some idea of scale of the the colony's mite problem. Killing them in the freezer is actually far more humane than it sounds. Bees aren't hot blooded like we are, in the evenings stray bees in the garden can be seen to grind to a halt as the temperature drops, if it doesn't drop too low they can be seen moving again in the mornings.

Meditation And The Art Of Beekeeping

I recently finished reading Meditation And The Art Of Beekeeping  by Mark Magill so thought I'd write a quick review. I'd not previously heard of the author but  he also wrote wrote Why Is Buddha Smiling -I'm guessing the answer probably isn't because Blink 182 named their 1998 album after him, but I've not read it so I can't be certain.. He's a contributor to Tricycle: the Buddhist Review amongst other things, wrote the film Waiting For The Moon, which won an award at the 1987 sundance Film Festival but really doesn't look like my cup of tea, and produced Far From Poland, a 1984 docudrama about Polish exiles from what I can gather -sounds almost as exciting as this blog. He also keeps bees, and meditates.

The first thing that strikes you about this book is the presentation. Leaping Hare Press have given it an attractive textured hardback cover, spared no expense on the quality of the paper and graced it with attractive endpages. Before you start on the contents the the book is already an attractive object in it's own right. A quick look at their back catalogue shows they've produced a number of books on the themes of mindfullness and meditation twinned with other topics such as Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens and The Art of Mindful Gardening. They also market seedbomb kits and a book on the subject for any budding guerrilla gardeners out there. Interesting. I suspect I may be making a couple more purchases there.

Meditation and the Art of Beekeeping

Having admired the book I then proceeded to read it. Obviously. Meditation and the Art of Beekeeping is an unusual read. It's a blend of autobiography, philisophy, history, observations, advice and information, interepersed with extracts from beekeeping texts,poems, plays, philosophical and religious texts from various Dalai Lamas, Shakespeare, Reverend Langstroth, Virgil, Emily Dickinson, Lao Tzu and Buddha amongst others.

Magil writes with a laidback easygoing style -just as you could reasonably expect from a proponent of meditation. He also keeps it interesting, so much so that I read the whole this cover to cover book in about 4 sessions, that said it's not the longest book in the world, weighing in at 135 generously spaced pages. He explains the ancient practice of 'bee lining' which was how mankind used to locate honey from wild bees -and no doubt something I'll be slipping into an entry about on here at somepoint. He also explains why honey keeps so long and why bacteria and yeast can't live in it. He explains that darker honey has more antioxidants in it than lighter honey which I found particularly interesting given the two very different shades of my harvest. He tells us of a chance meeting with an old beekeeper that led to work. There's an explanation of the bee politics used in colony descision making -yes they had democracy long before we did. He tells us of losing bees over winter and how he has to order new colonies annually  -something I'm hoping to avoid but time will tell. There's also the problems of black bears and New York City Health Code's article 161.01.

Something else Magill writes about is Brother Adam's Paradox, quoting the old monk's own thoughts on the topic. Something I'd not heard mentioned anywhere else so far. Since Brother Adam's hybridisation programme which successfully created the Buckfast Bee  following the decimation of the United Kingdoms native black bees, by tracheal mite, hybrid bees are now replacing the original breeds of bees all over the world meaning an actual reduction in bio diversity.

As the title suggests the book isn't solely about keeping bees, it's also about meditation. Magill outlines the differences between concentrative and mindful meditation and a little about how to engage in them. However the book isn't really a "how to" for meditation, or in fact beekeeping, so assuming it caught your interest you'd need to do some further study to become proficient in either.

It's hard to say who this book is actually aimed at but I'd say it's interesting read for anyone already interested in keeping bees.