(This was an unfinished article from 2018, which has been finished in 2022!)
I was reminded this evening that I hadn’t written my blog for over a year. Where does time go?  Unfortunately in 2018, work got in the way of bees in the spring and the beautiful summer we experienced was so busy with the bees, that I didn’t really sit down to write anything.

So what happened in 2018 with the bees? Well the summer was so warm that the flowers and trees kept producing nectar and the bees carried on collecting it and making into honey. I struggled to keep up with them. After a lot of long hours over the honey extractor I collected 25 x 30 lb buckets in July and August. My highest total ever. I also had time to send some off to be analysed for its pollen content. Interesting data as shown below:

Data: National Honey Monitoring scheme
You can see the 15 most abundant plants that were found in my honey sample from 2018 above. Note that’s the 15 most abundant pollen samples from a much larger number.