Join Kit & Matt as they check on their over-wintering bees, and chat about the regenerative benefits of mead production and the big problem facing honey producers all over the world.
Transcription
Hi, I'm Kit.
And I'm Matt.
We're brothers, beekeepers and mead makers on a mission to bring mead to the masses and show people the value of true, natural provenance.
We manage beehives all up and down the Wye Valley that generously provide the honey we use to make our mead.
And today we're visiting some bees in the depths of their winter hibernation.
What's the plan then, Matt?
Well, we're going to light the smoker.
It's a really cold day in early winter, so they're going to be really unhappy to see us.
But we're here to check to make sure they're happy and they've got plenty of food.
We're gonna light the smoker because that's gonna keep them calmer.
A honey bee is programmed to attack fluffy things because in nature, they defend their hives against brown bears.
So this is really fluffy — they're gonna drill into that and then they're gonna try and sting it.
So for the sound people, it's gonna be a really loud buzzing in the ear.
Fine. So we've got our smoker, we've got our hive tool.
We're going to get cracking.
Let's do it.
Watch out for the bucket down there.
Before we go much further, you might be wondering — what is mead?
Put simply, it's honey and water fermented together into an alcoholic drink.
But wait, there's way more to it than that.
You can add fruit to it, you can add spices to it, you can age it in different containers.
So although it's got really simple ingredients, the variations you can do on those things are quite exciting.
It's the world's oldest alcohol.
It is. It's the world's oldest drink.
I think that you can't read — well, you can't read many kind of old storybooks and things without the word mead cropping up.
When we talked to people initially about making mead, they go,
"Oh, that's what monks and Vikings used to drink, isn't it?"
Well, yes — because there wasn't much else around. So that was kind of... that was the go-to.
At Wetherspoons at the time, that's all they had.
So culturally, it's really nice. It's got lots and lots of heritage and history behind it.
And a lot of people are curious because they've heard about it.
But also from our point of view, it's a really nice environmentally friendly product to make.
What other raw material can benefit the area around which it's gathered?
You know, nothing else.
Honey — the bees will benefit the area around where the hive is because they'll go and pollinate flowers and plants.
But you can't say that about hardly anything, I don't think.
The kind of proof is in the pudding, I suppose.
In that we started the business with 20 hives of bees — now we've got over 200 hives.
So that is 10 times more.
10 times increase.
That's a good hive.
See, they've produced a crop of honey in there.
They've got plenty to eat.
They're not even up on their honey yet, so when they're hungry, they move up and they'll sit on this.
But at the moment, they're absolutely fine.
Oh, there's a bumblebee in there.
There is — so that might be an overwintering queen bee.
It was huge.
Yeah, queen bumblebee.
Why are bees important? Go on then.
Yeah, so bees are important because they pollinate all the flowers that we see.
They are a cornerstone of nature, really, in that they facilitate growth and reproduction in flowering plants.
And they're also really important because from a really selfish human point of view, they pollinate a lot of our crops.
Isn't it like a third of all the food that we eat is pollinated by...
I think it's anything that's, you know, not wind pollinated — so that's, you know, your corn and your wheat and your barley.
You know, all the vegetables you eat.
Cotton — pollinated by bees.
There's a lot of bees hanging on the doorstep. What are they doing there?
They're trying to make sure that we don't disturb them too much.
And this is what makes it such a highly valued product — because this is expensive, to do all these checks to make sure they're happy in the winter.
But actually, you know, this is why people would counterfeit it.
Because you don't need to do this if you're making fake honey.
And obviously the product quality won't be nearly as high — it won’t be the real thing.
But this is the way it should be made.
Sadly, not everyone sees it that way, as a huge amount of honey produced in the world doesn't go anywhere near a bee.
Did you know that honey is one of the world's most widely counterfeited food products, along with milk and olive oil?
In fact, a third of the world's honey is now thought to be fake.
It's such a big business that many large global honey producers have developed advanced methods to trick even the most sophisticated of tests.
Meaning, until measures are adopted to regulate this market, you can't currently be sure if the jars on your local supermarket shelves contain purely honey — or are being bulked out with cheaper alternatives like sugar syrup.
A good rule of thumb is: if it seems too cheap to be true, it probably is.
So, what's the answer?
Your local friendly beekeeper — if you can find one!
Hey!
I'll show you what they look like in the winter.
So not many people will see beehives in the winter.
This is a cluster of bees in the winter.
So you can see it's not a very big hive.
We've got one, two, three, four, maybe five seams of bees there.
It's just in the middle here.
They're keeping the middle of that section there to about 35 degrees because they're going to start laying pretty soon, actually.
And they're going to need to incubate their eggs.
Like a chicken sitting on eggs — this is what the bees do.
They sit on their eggs and eat the food that they can get to.
I'm going to give these guys some food because I don't think they've got a huge amount.
They've got a few of those frames, but I'm gonna need to step in and give them some food.
And we're gonna assemble that now.
So this is a very sticky job.
This is icing sugar — the bees need carbohydrate, they need sugar.
And normally they'd have their own honey.
These guys haven't produced very well in the autumn, which is because of the weather and the not-very-good season we had.
This is like feeding someone who's really, really hungry just a plate of chips.
Like, it's not going to be your quinoa salad or, you know, something really healthy.
But this will absolutely keep them in good form.
So is this a particularly unusual thing to do this time of year or is this becoming the norm now? Is it changing at all with the climate?
Yeah, climate change has been a really interesting one.
We've had really extreme weather this autumn — we've had high rainfall, we've had lots of storms that have come through.
And that has meant it's just a more unpredictable season.
So we give them a little bit of extra help because, you know, we've looked after these bees through the whole year.
We have taken a crop off them.
You know, so these bees have contributed towards our business, and it's now our turn to return the favour and make sure they get through the winter.
Oh yeah, I think I've got a bee in my microphone.
Yeah, I think you will. I'm surprised it didn't happen earlier.
That's all from the beehives for today.
Thanks for tuning in, and join us next time in the meadery when we’ll be showing you how we turn all this lovely honey into beer and mead.
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