Bees, Bikes, Burgers, Beers and Buttocks

by Alan Cole · Monday, July 20th, 2026

The amazing summer weather continues. We haven’t seen a drop of rain for almost three weeks now, and every day has been either hot or very hot. The sea is lovely, the grass is yellow and the trails are dusty.

We’re recycling bath water each day to give the struggling garden plants a drink and, while the sun shines, we’ve been making honey rather than hay.

Biking

The mountain biking trails are dry and dusty too, which makes for some great riding. I spent Saturday morning on what turned out to be my longest ride of the year so far. That sounds impressive, but at just under 35 miles with a little over 1,000 metres of climbing, it really only highlights how little riding I’ve been doing recently. The fact that I was pretty exhausted by the end only reinforced that.

It was nice to get out though and, after a night ride on Thursday where we had our arms and legs ripped to pieces by gorse and brambles, it was more of the same: blood, sweat and turbines.

Bees

Saturday was then spent extracting honey from one of our bee colonies. Things have been going well in the apiaries this year. As mentioned previously, we lost all but one colony over the winter, so the emphasis this year has been on performing splits, raising new queens and increasing the number of colonies we have going into winter.

So far, so good. I have successfully split the original colony twice. The first, earlier split managed to raise a new queen and has been busy building up into what is now a strong-looking colony. The second, later split has also successfully re-queened and should build up nicely over the next month or so.

Having donated around four frames of bees and brood to each of these new colonies, I wasn’t necessarily expecting great things from the original hive. The queen is now two or three years old, they’ve contributed at least eight frames to create two new colonies, and they’ve still managed to recover remarkably well from all that disruption.

They are once again filling the brood chamber and have been busily filling an ever-increasing stack of honey supers. With four full supers and a fifth being drawn out, the hive looked to be in full production.

So, despite concentrating on increasing colony numbers this year, we were still going to get a decent honey harvest. We took two supers off at the weekend and extracted almost 18 kg (40 lb) of honey.

I like to leave the bees with at least one full super of their own honey as it seems a little mean to take it all. However, with the wet supers now back on the hive, two full supers still in place and another being drawn out, I’m hopeful of a second harvest in a month or so.

The first of the splits also has two full supers and a third being filled, so we might get another one or two supers of honey from that colony as well.

Burgers and Beer

After a busy day of biking and bees, a good burger and a beer seemed entirely justified. I was still feeling a little tired after the bike ride, so despite the wind I skipped the windsurfing. The burger and beer probably did more for my recovery anyway!

Buttocks

Sunday started with a run on the beach before it got too hot. I was going OK, but I’ve had a recurring pain deep in my left buttock for about 12 months now. It started towards the end of backpacking the Hebridean Way this time last year and has never quite gone away.

I’m still not sure whether it’s my hip, a tendon, a muscle or some form of sciatica, but after about two miles of running it started to hurt quite badly, so I stopped and walked home. It then got progressively worse throughout the day and now, on Monday morning, I’m having trouble walking. At the moment the pain is confined to my left buttock, but it’s certainly not comfortable. I haven’t been able to shift it myself, so I’m trying to get an appointment with a physiotherapist.

Needless to say, my planned surf ski or windsurfing session on Sunday never happened. Instead, I spent the rest of the day taking it easy while Anna decanted the honey into jars and I labelled them ready for sale. They’re selling as quickly as ever.