Chimney Honey

Four years ago today we were collecting sooty honey from the bedroom fireplace above this stove in the front room. In the summer of 2011 a swarm of bees had settled in my bedroom chimney. The fireplace in that room is boarded up and the terracotta chimney has a lid (also terracotta; it's not a separate cowl) but with some side air holes for ventilation. The bees used one of these as their entrance.

At the time, I called a beekeeper friend to ask what to do because hundreds of bees were getting into the house and although I helped as many as I could to get outside again, in the hope that they'd find their way back to the chimney, a lot of them died.  He said that since the swarm was inaccessible it was best to just leave them alone and they would also leave us alone.

After a day or two, the swarm apparently settled down and made a hive, presumably attached to the inside of the chimney. We would hear a lot of buzzing during the day but they'd go quiet at night. And, as Bee Person had said, they stopped coming into the bedroom (by crawling under the skirting boards) and only used the outdoor chimney entrance.

One night some weeks later, I heard a loud 'kerflump' from the chimney just as I was going to sleep.  There was no subsequent buzzing. I thought no more about it until Hogmanay when I found a blob of shiny, sticky stuff on top of the stove and some underneath it. Shining a torch up this chimney, which is 'stoppered' except for the stove flue, I saw that the stuff was dripping not down the chimney but seeping down inside the wall! A taste test confirmed that it was honey and looking at a blob in the microscope confirmed that there were soot particles in it. There was not very much honey in the end but it showed that the bees had made a nest and had begun to make honey before they died.

There's interesting stuff inside the walls of the Boggy Brae house!

Bookshelves and a mantelpiece

During...

After...

Space! partly because I'm putting the books two deep on some shelves and partly because there's a boxload of stuff for Derbyshire Daughter, and we're getting rid of some too.

Stones of wild cherries and a cotton mouse

The plan was to clean the stones of Boggy Brae wild cherries in a hot water solution of sodium percarbonate so that I can make a cherry stone bag to warm up in the microwave oven and stuff into this mouse for a sick child. The photo to the left shows my first experimental batch.

The cotton mouse used to be Toadlet's but I'm going to pass it on to the grandsons.

The cleaning process worked quite well, and inspecting the gnaw marks on the stones where bank voles or wood mice had opened them to take out the kernel was interesting, but some of the stones had a covering of what I think is a black resupinate fungus which I didn't think would be good to have in a warming bag.

I guess my old wild cherry stones from under the soggy dead leaves of monbretia were not quite fresh enough for the purpose. Ah well, I daresay a purchased cherry stone bag, probably made with the stones of cultivated cherries, will work just as well. Or a wheat bag. Or some such.

It's good to see that the wild cherry stones are a useful source of food for some small animals.