The warm, sweet smell of honey was so strong it had begun to sway towards the sickly side of delicious. We thought it might be time to harvest a few bars.

Last year when bee mania hit our sharehouse the newspaper arrived on our doorstep with a front page cautionary tale of beekeeping gone wrong in Flemington. We considered ourselves safe as long as we steered clear of “bizarre nocturnal attempt(s) to move a beehive onto a roof” and “beer fueled escapade(s)” . But when it came time to try harvesting our honey, finding ourselves short of a suit, smoker and experience, we thought who better to call than our Irish neighbour of “bee bungle” fame, we bee keepers have to stick together and afterall 60 stings later he would surely be a lot wiser for his experience.

Quick to laugh and enjoy the challenges of the bee keeping experience, Andrew was a delightful addition to our little honey gang. And challenges are never shy around us, culminating in our bees having been very busy over spring fusing the bars diagonally to each other rather than in neat little lines. So the removal experience wasn’t quite as easy as we had hoped, a call to the bee man, Martin, informed us we would probably have to remove the offending combs in winter and start afresh! There weren’t many stings, although one did involve an unfortunate incident of a bee flying up someone’s pants which elicited gales of laughter from the flats above.

The gorgeous, golden Flemington honey was worth our misadventures and hopefully with a little bit of experience we will be running our bee operation in a less chaotic fashion next year.