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!