Eric's African honey bees

Meet my good friend Eric Shaw, one of the most incredible people I’ve ever known. At the ripe old age of six…well, I’ll spare him the blushes. Suffice it to say that he’s been around for a while, yet has more energy than most teenagers I know. Eric is a veteran environmentalist and a founding member of the Gibraltar Ornithological and Natural History Society. He heads the group’s marine section and also runs the management program for Gibraltar’s famous monkeys, the Barbary Macaques. In his spare time, he is also the director of The Helping Hand Trust, a charity he founded and which actively campaigns for the protection of the marine environment around the Rock. Eric is an early riser. By 6am most days, he is up and about feeding the monkeys. As you’d imagine, Eric’s work for GONHS and the Helping Hand means he has a lot of good anecdotes to tell. Today though, I want to talk about something else: Bees and honey. Eric’s bees and honey, to be precise.

Lower Bruce’s Farm is a former colonial house in the Upper Rock Nature Reserve that doubles as a research centre for visiting biologists and naturalists. It’s run by Eric and has stunning views of the Bay of Gibraltar below and the mountains of Morocco in the distance. The grounds around the house are covered in dense Mediterranean shrubs and thick groves of wild olive trees. Dotted around the place are bee hives, each with a constant flow of worker bees ferrying pollen from the olive blossoms to the combs inside. Eric and another Helping Hand volunteer, Chris, keep a careful eye on the hives but, for the most part, the bees tend to themselves.

The bee-keeping project came about by accident some years ago. First the Helping Hand inherited some hives. Then someone had a problem with a swarm of bees in his garden. Enter Eric and Chris, who somehow managed to trap the swarm and re-home it in a hive placed in the shade in a quiet corner of the farm. Along the way they learnt many lessons, some from an experienced bee keeper called Anthony Hall, a curator at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew. They also learnt about the important role played by bees in maintaining a healthy ecological balance in any natural environment. These days, Eric and Chris are called out several times a year as the bees migrate across the Strait of Gibraltar – yes, you read that right! - during the spring. They go, pick up the swarms and set up new hives. Their motivation is the boost they know the bees provide to the surrounding flora. You can read more about it all here on the Trust’s website.

So anyway, with the bees happily at work, the next step was harvesting the honey. It wasn't always easy. Although the hives were equipped with ready-made combs, some bees made beautiful, organic combs on the underside of the lid! I won’t go into how they do the harvesting because you’re better off reading it on their site. But I will say this. It’s pretty special honey. I’ve tasted nothing like it before. It’s sweet, yet not overpoweringly so. It has sugary crystals, yet it is smooth and runny. Unusually, a savoury aftertaste lingers on the palate after each spoon. Eric puts this down to the fact that the bees are collecting pollen mainly from the olive trees around the farm. You could almost call this olive honey. Regular readers will know by now that I have a passion for olives and olive oil. To me, this honey is heavenly.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much of it to go around. Although it’s been declared good to eat by the health and safety people, production is limited and Eric keeps his for friends, particularly those who suffer from hay fever or asthma. Here’s his theory: every year, when the pollen count climbs, spring becomes an itchy, irritable hell for sufferers. But what if you could build up a tolerance to the pollen by consuming it daily in small doses? Homeopathic nonsense, I hear you say. Well, maybe. But as Eric told me when he delivered a jar of his unique honey for my allergy-hit 11-year old boy this week: “How would I know if this works? But look mate, at worst all he’s getting is a spoonful of one of nature's greatest gifts, nectar from the gods.”

Limited supplies permitting, watch out for a honey recipe or two in the weeks to come.