City streets give a taste of honey

Sep 11 2007 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

The bees are a-buzzing at Liverpool’s World Museum. Emma Pinch reports on the ultimate in organic food

AMBER-COLOURED and resinous, it tastes like a dollop of warm sunlit woods. But this is honey produced where traffic fumes rather than flowers scent the air – on the fifth storey of the World Museum Liverpool, on William Brown Street, to be exact.

“It’s beautiful honey,” enthuses Paul Finnegan, manager of the museum’s bughouse. “Very sweet and very pure.”

The hive there has already produced 30lb of honey this year, and another 30lb will be drawn off before winter, and Paul’s so sure of its purity he gives jars of it away to visiting schoolchildren.

Indeed, at this summer’s Chelsea Flower Show, city-produced honey was given the silver stamp of approval by the UK’s snootiest food store, Fortnum & Mason. It announced plans to make its own de luxe version and four palatial beehives – Georgian-style, oak-built and topped with a copper roof and gilded finial – were unveiled. Their incumbents are currently in rural Shropshire, but next spring they will reside in splendour above the nose-to-bumper traffic of London’s Piccadilly.

The honey will sell for a hefty £20 per pound.

Retired locomotive engineer Arthur Gillett, 88, is Liverpool’s most respected “bee man”. He is bemused at the price tag, but not unduly surprised.

“There are more flowers, shrubs and trees in the city than in the countryside so it’s better for bees and better for their honey,” he says. “Liverpool’s dual carriageways are lined with hundreds of horse chestnuts, sycamores, limes. There’s a saying that a ‘tree to a bee is a supermarket, whereas a flower is a corner shop’.

“Liverpool has lots of railway lines that are still there even if they are disused or under flight paths. They are all lined with trees, dandelions, willow herb and blackberries, whereas in the countryside the hedgerows have been grubbed up for crops.”

The exception, in terms of taste, he says, is heather honey.

Every year he takes his colonies from Croxteth Park and Woolton to Llangollen, in Wales, to let them gather nectar from the moors. The bees re-orientate themselves using ultraviolet light from the sun, a trick they can perform if their hives move within 3ft or else three miles of their original position.

“It is entirely different to flower honey and is very, very strong tasting,” he says. “Ordinary honey on the palate is like Cheshire cheese, heather is like Danish Blue. An hour or so after a meal it is still there at the back or your throat. That’s like heather honey.”

Arthur, who lives in Old Roan, regards his honey as an essential, but very tasty, medication. Indeed, researchers are now rediscovering the myriad medicinal properties of honey, and not before time. The Egyptians had 500 medications based on it, for healing, among other things, wounds, ulcers and sore throats. Its acidity, low water content and naturally occurring hydrogen peroxide mean it is antibacterial and antimicrobial, and it’s also an effective moisturiser.

“I have honey on my porridge in the morning and I bake my own bread and cakes with honey,” says Arthur. “I also eat the resin that bees pave their hives with, from pine trees, which is a natural antibiotic.” Has it worked?

“I’ve got to this stage in life, and I don’t even get colds,” he insists. “If I burn myself on the oven, I put some honey on it and it’s gone by morning.”

As the ultimate in organic, free-range food, honey is completely dependent on the natural environment, so because of our short English summer much of it is imported from abroad. On its journey it will often undergo at least three heat treatments – to rectify granulisation and to pasteurise it, and it is then bulked up by low-grade Chinese honey.

The number of people switching on to the health and leisure benefits of producing it on their balconies, gardens, roofs and allotments is growing.

In the last year, almost 1,200 new members joined the ranks of the National Bee Keepers Association, joining 40,000 countrywide.

One glimpse into the mysterious but uber-efficient world of bees has many hooked.

A single hive is home to between 20,000 and 80,000 bees – one queen bee to 200 male drone bees, and the rest female worker bees.

The role of the drone bee is purely to mate with their queen. But his life is no picnic. After mating with the queen, they die. If there are any left in the hive by winter they are killed and ruthlessly cast out, to avoid wasting their honey on them.

Worker bees clean the “house”, fabricate comb, and toil over a five- mile radius to collect nectar.

Mental health support worker Alison Pollard bought her first hive two years ago after seeing them displayed at the Brouhaha International Street Festival. She keeps them on her allotment in Aigburth Vale.

“I just love how self-sufficient they are,” confesses Alison, 43. “You open the hive and there are thousands of them just getting on with their bee business. People think they will fly out in a big cartoon angry arrow, but they don’t. All they want to do is make honey.

“I can’t think of any of my friends who haven’t been fascinated when I’ve lifted the lid off, and two others on my allotment have started keeping them now. They are the perfect antidote to stress.”

While the honey industry is worth around £15m to the economy per year, the by-product of this cottage industry is even more significant.

Crop pollination by honey bees is worth £200m per annum to agriculture, and Einstein is quoted as saying the planet would cease to exist within two generations without bees to pollinate crops.

So, in an understated way, Arthur and his fellow honey enthusiasts are helping to safeguard the future.

“It’s a bonus, because none of us will make a fortune from our bees,” he smiles. “It’s about the people you meet, our own few pounds of honey and just the joy of keeping them.”

Tasty treats

* HONEY is mentioned in the oldest written works, dating back to 2100BC, where it features in Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform texts.

* Honeybees must tap over 2m flowers to make one pound of honey, flying a distance equal to more than three times around the world.

* The average worker bee will make only one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey during its lifetime.

* The famous Scottish liqueur, Drambuie, is made with honey.