Filling in some of the gaps

In any spare time I had today I finished copying the last of the Journal entries from the Blogger web site in to the Blurb book wright software on my Mac.

Once I've finished formatting, editing and proof reading, these will become the fifth hardback volume of the Bad Man's Journal.

As I scanned the entries from 2016 it dawned on me that the Journal recorded the trials and tribulations of my first year of beekeeping, but I had left the story unfinished.  At the point of abandonment I had two hives, one of which had been re-queened, and the beekeeping year was coming to a close.

Well I can report that both of those colonies survived the Winter of 2016 / 17 and over the intervening years the number of hives has increased. At the start of this year I had five in the back garden and one a mile, or so, down the road beside Kathy H-R's cherry tree.

We took our first honey crop in 2017 and our two hives gave us 90 lbs of honey.  As the number of hives has increased, so has our crop and we produced 145 lbs in 2018 and close to 185 lbs last year.

We've designed some rather natty packaging and seem to have developed a reputation for producing a quality local honey. As a result we have no problem selling a good portion of our crop from the doorstep.

 We have been invited to sell at a couple of local food fairs and even went "International" for a while when the Cardiff Deli, that employed TP, decided to stock our Honey.  Now a Deli is exactly the sort of outlet where you would expect to find a small scale local honey, but our honey has also done really well being sold from a local Hairdresser and currently from a rather bijou little Jeweller in Alcester.