Bee Keeping: Inspiration and Practical Advice For Would-be Smallholders

Half way through a so far very mild winter and after a few shortlived freezing spells the weather is finally getting down the traditional winter business of being bloody cold. Whilst people start their days scraping ice off car windscreens and heading to work the bees continue to do very little. Leaving me with nothing to write about.. so..

Another day another book review! Don't worry I'll keep it brief.

I was given a copy of Beekeeping as a gift by a jolly nice friend. It's published by Country Living for The National Trust this is one very attractive book. It has a yellow and black hardback cover with an olde worlde schoole booke feele to it. It's nicely laid out with colour and black and white hand drawn illustrations. As with Get Started In Beekeeping and Bees At the Bottom Of The Garden this is an introduction to beekeeping telling you how to kit yourself out and manage bees for a year, however this was written in 2007 making it more recent than either of the other two. It also has an RRP a couple of quid less than the others as well.

Inspirational and Practical Advice

-in one handy volume!

It's actually the shortest of the three books and starts with a still relevant quote for the cost of a starter beekeeping kit (hive, tools and safety gear) -afterall that's probably something worth knowing up front when deciding whether you want to continue reading about beekeeping or not. As with the other books the author, or possibly authors as it seems to be credited to an editor with no individual authors mentioned, it tells you how to start up in beekeeping, maintain your bees and harvest your/their honey. There's less science in this book than the others but TBH you probably don't really need to know the names of the each stage of a bee's gut straight away.

I've found myself referring back to this pleasant little volume a number of times in the past year and towards the end there's a month by month detailing of the beekeeper's year telling you what you should be doing and when. The entry for January doesn't say "pad out your blog with book reviews" which is quite a glaring ommission but it's still handy as a quick reference.

Mead Revisited

A few months ago I made some mead, I did one batch in September and one in late October and had racked both batches straight into wine bottles. By early December there was a little sediment visible in some of the bottles so I decided to rebottle them (or 'rerack' them to use wine maker parlance) to clean them up a bit. After opening each bottle's contents was then passed through a coffee filters into a sterilised bottle and then corked with a real cork -no more of those crappy plastic ones. I was surprised to find that 2 of the bottles were fizzy. A little research, and by that I mean 2 minutes on Google of course, told me this meant the mead was probably still fermenting in the bottles which isn't a huge problem although it might affect the mead's final pH, otherwise it could mean bacterial fermentation which can ruin the bottle. Quite blatantly I'm no expert but the fizzy stuff tasted pretty fine to me so I went ahead and assumed it'd going to be ok. I sampled the normal mead and was pleasantly impressed by that too.

When I uncorked the fizzy two there was a pop and fizz due to the pressure that'd built up so I hoped, in my layman way, that they won't build up enough pressure to break the glass bottles and decided to periodically check the corks on those bottles weren't being pushed out. If they are being pushed out I'd be recorking them rather than pushing the corks back in. Eventually the alcohol level should kill off any remaining yeast in there.

Twenty days later I was surprised to step in something wet on the dining room floor. My first thought was to assume the fu-flipping cat had got bored with her tray and decided to try somewhere exciting and new to pee but looking down I realised one of my mead bottles was missing it's cork. I pulled out the bottle. It was one of the two that'd been fizzing when I reracked them before. There was about a glassfull left in it so I did the sensible thing and poured the remainder into a wine glass and drank it. It was still very fizzy and also really dry, would've been better chilled. Anyway that important task completed I wondered where the cork had gone. Didn't take long to find it. The cork was on the far side of the room where it's come to rest against the skirting board. It must've left that bottle at high pressure and I was probably lucky the glass didn't break. After cleaning the floor and the wine rack I located the other bottle that'd been merrily fizzing when it was reracked and stuck it in the out building, my logic was the cold temperature (early January at athe time) would slow down any biology still happening in there and help keep the CO2 dissolved.

Two days later I found another wet patch on the dining room floor. Same place as before. As before I quickly got a wine glass and poured the remainder in, unlike the previous bottle this one was really sweet. I guess fermentation had either still been going on when it was rebottled or it'd restarted soon afterwards General tinternet-consensus seems to be to add some crushed campden tablet and Sorbitrate to kill off any remaining yeast or other bacteria. I don't know what sorbitate is but I did have some Young's wine Finings that I'd picked up and had a vague idea that it probably does a similar job. So donning safety goggles and the thick leather gardening gloves I use to stroke the evil bugger of a cat that lives in my house, I carefully opened each bottle one at a time expecting an explosion of broken glass and fermented honey. My cunning plan was to drop in some crushed campdem tablet to stun any yeast then use the finings in small doses to kill it off. However all the other bottles were flat, including the one that'd been fizzing when I rebottled it. I recorked them all as I went and hoped it didn't impact upon the mead too much.

I guess that the second bottle to pop whilst it had been flat at the time of rebottling had resumed fermentation shortly afterwards. Meanwhile the in second bottle that had been fizzing the yeast eventually died off and the fermentation stopped before anything too explosive happened. I noticed that the second bottle to pop it's cork had some visible sediment in it and doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out this probably meant the yeast was breeding in the corked bottle for a while.

So what've I learned? Bugger all. Just kidding. I now know to leave the liquid in a demijohn under an airlock for a longer prior to racking to bottles. Racking straight into bottles too soon was evidently a beginner's error. I've also learnt that you can't really predict where fermentation is going to restart hence the second bottle to pop it's cork not being the one I expected. Something else I pondered was the different tastes of the two bottles I'd tried, one was dry as a desert and the other one sweeter. I think the first bottle was from the first batch I'd made up using the paler honey and the second from batch with the darker honey. So that's another thing to bear in mind for future brewing projects. Now I'm two bottle's down and a little bit wiser.