Summer on the Hill

the wheel keeps turning

The heather is coming into bloom. Soon it will be a blaze of royal pink and purple across the hill, splashed with golden gorse and buzzing with the busyness of bumblebees. So many bumblebees! Big, fat, heavy ones that defy the laws of physics as they bumble from heathery tussock to heathery tussock and little, fluffy ones that zoom zigzags across the hill.

We thought about putting honeybee hives on our heather and gorse. With native, Irish honeybees, of course. I use a lot of honey, as our sole sweetener in anything that requires sweetening—as you know if you’ve been following for the last while, we’re eating exclusively locally for a year, and lucky for us very much, very good, wildflower honey is produced locally by very many small-scale, backyard beekeepers. But to have our own honey, from our own heather that grows so voraciously from our shallow, peaty soil, the ambrosial nectar of the land, what a gift that would be! We decided against it, for now, so as not to upset the resident…