Monday February 4 2019 THE NATIONAL MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM, BIRMINGHAM
talking trends Everything is connected with everything else
Food should be at the heart of the housewares industry, believes Roger Morgan-Grenville, director of supplier Dexam
You can put the causes down to a whole cocktail of things, from monoculture to land management, urban spread and pesticide use. But in taking the hobby up, you are striking a giant blow for the future. For the nerd, it is the ultimate scalable activity:
your hive will eventually contain 50,000 small tenants, each of which will make the grand total of a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in their six-week lives, during which each of them will travel 200 or so miles and visit over 1,000 plants and flowers in the process.
“My imagination was well and truly fired”
It’s a hobby that takes as much or as little out of S
poiler alert: this article has precious little to do with the housewares industry, although it throws a long shadow over
what I have banged on about for decades, namely that our trade should be more interested in food itself than it oſten seems to be, and that part of the future is to work hand in hand with the best bits of the food industry. Everything, as Lenin once said, is connected to everything else, and food should very definitely be at the heart of the housewares industry. Lecture over. For the last three years, I have been learning how
to become one of the UK’s quarter of a million beekeepers - and I have just triumphantly returned from the first show at which I actually exhibited my honey. When I say ‘triumphant’, I don’t want you to get the idea that I got a first, second, third or even highly commended card positioned under my two jars of ‘medium colour, liquid, wildflower honey’. But that I didn’t get disqualified, and the judge wrote in his notes that it was ‘nothing to be ashamed of’. You might think that after two weeks of spinning,
filtering (four times), jarring, removing air bubbles, clarifying and bottle cleaning, I would be a bit disappointed with this result. But you would be wrong. I was delighted. The world of the honey exhibitor is as competitive a one as anything in the Premier
Roger’s own wildflower honey September/October 2018
League, and I was glad not to be have been thrown out at the first fence. Like all good things, I started keeping bees by
mistake. A friend announced that he was trying to get rid of an old hive that was cluttering up the place, on the same weekend that another friend said he had a swarm of bees in his garden and asked did I know anyone who could come and deal with it?
your week as you choose. At the bottom end, a 10- minute inspection every summer week is all you need. At the top end, the bloke called Brad who cleaned up at our local honey show reckons he spends about 20 hours a week on it at show time, and produces honey to match. You can start it for free, as I did, or (as I was to go
on to do) buy a proper hive kit, and make an initial outlay of about £300 to get up and running with all the equipment you need. So what, I hear you ask? So nothing. If just one of the people reading Housewares Magazine takes up beekeeping as an indirect consequence of what I’ve written, then another 50,000 bees will have a home, and countless plants will be pollinated. Then there will be more honey, which will make people think of inventive ways of using it in their cooking, which will - hey presto -mean that we all sell more kitchenware… or something.
Quite how I didn’t end up in hospital I’m not quite
sure. But, by the end of the weekend, and without the benefit of a suit and veil, I had a (very unhappy) colony of bees established in a (very rotten) hive alongside my compost heap, and my imagination was well and truly fired. Drawing a veil over what happened next, I ended up a couple of years later with two separate colonies in two newish hives, and (eventually) a larder full of wildflower honey. Honey bees - and their relatives the bumble bees
- have declined in both species and number by around a quarter to a third since the turn of the millennium, and this has a huge effect on the pollination of all the plants and flowers around us.
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