It’s that time of the year again, when we try to get rid of the honey we painstakingly extracted from our ten hives over the course of the summer. Unfortunately, or perhaps in this context thankfully, this has been an extremely poor year in terms of honey harvest: From our nine productive hives we collected no more than 190 kilos. That’s about as much as we’d get from four hives on a good year. But there is of course a silver lining, in that we’ve been able to use this season to get used to some new ways of packaging our product.

Anyway. I have had a bit of a bad week and I could feel this somewhat impeding my skills as a saleswoman today. So in this post I wanted simply to whine a bit about things that really get on my nerves when doing this honey-selling gig:

1. People who think bees are wasps. “Hi, I’m a beekeeper.” “Oh? Where do you keep your wasps?” “Nono. BEES. You know. Honeybees.” “They’re all the same.” “*facepalm*”
2. People who think they know more than I do because they were in the same room as a beekeeper once. “This is rapeseed honey.” “Well actually…” “It’s rape. Rapeseed honey is always pale and hard.” “Yeah but…” “It’s rapeseed.” Ok, so everyone can’t have studied formal logic (which would tell them that “A is B, therefore all that is B is A” is wrong), but could they at least listen?
3. People who think it’s perfectly ok to accuse me of tampering with my honey to my face in front of an audience. Maybe the beekeepers where you come don’t take any pride in their work, but I certainly do.
4. People who think it’s a good idea to take up my time by telling them how they, or their father, or grandfather, or someone else vaguely related to them in some way, kept bees 40 years ago in Nowhereland. How I would like to tell them: “I’m here to inform people about beekeeping and the lives of honeybees as well as to sell honey. I may look young but I’ve done this for 12 years! Do you honestly think I haven’t heard your beekeeping stories a hundred times before? Also I’m smarter than you. Go away.”
5. And on a completely unrelated note, I really hate the way cafés insist on making sandwiches. I want the cheese, ham and vegetables evenly spread between the bread, not perching precariously on the edge of it with cheese on one side, ham on the other and the veggies in the middle. I always have to remake the sandwich myself so what the hell am I paying for?

Other than this, it has been an enjoyable day. Most people - customers or just curious bystanders - are open, interested and willing to listen to my ramblings about honey and flowers and shit. I got a fair amount of honey sold (only a few jars to take back home), and it’s always enjoyable watching kids squeal and stare wide-eyed at the tiny demonstration hive. Teenagers just go “eww!” and shy away (I was a very unusual 13-yr-old to take up this hobby) but younger kids are all absolutely fascinated by the creepy-crawly-buzzy things.

bees, beekeeping, honey